joseph@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Seymour Joseph) (12/08/89)
Greetings, My project owns and uses 19 Hayes Interbridges. They were purchased a few years ago and cause more problems than any other network device we use. I called Hayes a few months ago to ask about upgrades and they told me the version 1.09 roms in my units were buggy and outdated. They offered to upgrade them to 1.19 (the then current version) for free. What the heck, I said yes. This week I was surprised by the arrival of 19 roms from Hayes that bear the revision number 2.00. They were shipped with 19 new copies of the InterBridge manager software. When I put the new ROM in an Interbridge and Turn it on, the Interbridge manager software claims it is now an AppleTalk Phase II bridge. Great! Well, actually, not so great. Updated bridges work and speak to each other just fine, but it seems that they will not communicate with older versions, and they do not communicate with our Kinetics Fastpaths running KIP. Once I upgrade an Interbridge, it ceases to get the zone list from the KBOX or phase I Interbridges. When I run a network application from a net with both a KBOX and a phase II InterBridge, the two network devices fight to see who gets to supply the zone list. And half the time, the InterBridge wins and supplies an incomplete one (It won't get updates from the KBOX so it cannot see any zones on the other side of it.) My initial calls to Hayes have been non-productive. Their front line tech support folks claim this ROM should be fully backward compatible with earlier versions. It clearly isn't. I have not spoken with their InterBridge expert yet, we keep missing each other. Hopefully there will be a simple fix. If anyone has enlightening information I would appreciate it. Otherwise I will let you know what happens. Seymour Joseph joseph@elbereth.rutgers.edu