jmg@cernvax.UUCP (jmg) (02/04/88)
Several people replied directly to me regarding my previous message about Kinetics configuring, and reminded me that a zone may comprise a number of different AppleTalk physical segments, interlinked by bridges (including Kinetics FastPath). However, this was not the total answer to the problem which I was posing, so I will rephrase what I wanted to say. We have a very large site, and so we will have many AppleTalk segments. Sometimes it is appropriate to consider the site in terms of physical regions, at other times logical regions, sometimes a combination of the two. AppleTalk zones allows only a single hierarchical level (if you assume that the bridges linking several AppleTalk segments into a zone are effectively transparent). My suggestion with the Kinetics software was that by assigning different Ethernet network numbers to different non-intersecting sets of Kinetics FastPath boxes, any Kinetics with a particular number would only recognize others with the same number. Of course, within any such set there might be one or several zones. The end effect of this would be that the overall network manager could assign a general network number (a sort of general purpose one), but could permit other numbers to be used for particular sets of AppleTalk zones where the users wished neither to see nor to be seen by anyone else. For instance, a Finance Department might not want to take any risk of having its files seen outside (could happen if one of their personnel made a mistake and printed a document on a LaserWriter in a zone of some other department by mistake). One additional advantage of this scheme would be that, like DEC LAVC, the broadcasting between FastPath could be changed to multicast, with the network number as part of the multicast address. This would save every one of our hundreds of computers having to examine every broadcast packet. The only funny about the above is what would a Mac running directly on Ethernet (running EtherTalk) see. Left as an exercise for the reader!