balamut@HAC2ARPA.HAC.COM (Morris Balamut) (08/14/90)
Hi, I work for Hughes Aircraft and am part of the team that manages our company wide ethernet backbone. Our backbone covers a significant portion of southern California. We use T-1 circuits & Vitalink bridges to connect all the various sites together. We currently filter AppleTalk Phase 1 between all major locations. We do not filter AppleTalk Phase 2. We are not running any of the upgrade utilities. Phase 1 & phase 2 are two separate protocols, or at least that was our intention. We primarily use FastPaths as our gateway from appletalk to ethernet. Several locations have started to add GatorBoxs and are taking advantage of the IP tunneling to bypass the filtering on Phase 1. This by itself is not a problem. Our problems began when one location migrated their network & gatorboxs to Phase 2. Apparently the routing & network information from the phase 1 nodes is passed via the IP tunneling to the phase 2 gatorbox who then adds the information to it's routing table and proceeds to broadcast the information to the phase 2 network. In as much as we have lots of nodes on phase 1 and lots of nodes on phase 2 there ended up with conflict and confusion. I must point out that the phase 1 data was not routed to phase 2. Only the routing table info was passed on. It turned out that the majority of our problem came from improperly setup phase 1 networks. We have numbering & naming scheme here to avoid conflict, but one group was not following the guidelines. By observation, even when we fixed the phase 1 network numbers we still have intermittent problems that appear to be related to devices on the phase 2 network not properly handling the routing information from the phase 1 networks. Please note that the above is based on observation & trial & error. I have no proof that the phase1/phase 2 connection is a problem. I would appreciate any feedback and/or advice. Morris Balamut Network Consulting & Support balamut@hac2arpa.hac.com