lenny@icus.islp.ny.us (Lenny Tropiano) (10/15/89)
As most of the readers of these groups know, I just got myself two STARLAN NAU boards. I was having some problems with configuration of the HDB files (Devices, Dialers, etc..) because my installation script didn't adjust to my own files here. Thanks to a few people who replied to my "plea" for help (since I had no manuals -- and didn't want to spend hours trying figure out something that was a matter of changing one line...). Well after some more investigation, I noticed why my uucico didn't want to dial out using the starlan device. What happened I had a special version of HDB here that didn't have the starlan calls (starlan library) compiled with it. It was trying to open up /dev/starlan and just send stuff to it, expecting login: in return. That obviously didn't work. Some comments about STARLAN connections, they are real fast. It's nice to be able to "cu" to my machine (which previously just had one 19.2K RS232 connection between it). And then do uucp transfers at the same time (in either direction) as well as "cu" again, or "cu" the other way, all simultaneously ... The degradation in speed is negligible, but the load on both machines in my small network were pretty minimal. Thad Floryan (and others) will be able to tell us how things work when there is more than one STARLAN node connected in daisy-chain fashion. I'd like to hear if anyone actually has a *star* configuration using the STARLAN NEU (Network Extension Unit) [the Universities might do it this way...] Establishing a network connection using "cu" does take some time to sync up and actually connect to the remote site. I wonder why this is the case, uucico's start up real fast. I think because the "sl" (starlan login) service has to handle "pty" type devices called "psx" it might take a few seconds (almost 30) to get connected. I don't know how the Asynchronous Emulator (from the Phone Manager) works because I keep getting this: +--------------------------------------------+ | Error | | Profiles | | /u/lenny/Filecabinet/Profiles/-1 not | | found in Filecabinet/Profiles | | | +--------------------------------------------+ My device is set up as "STARLAN", with the data profile as STARLAN. -rw-rw---- 1 lenny icus 844 Oct 11 18:37 Profiles/STARLAN:Sl Well so much for that, I'm sure I'll figure it out, or at least have someone tell me what to do... ;-) Ok, a little benchmarking ... The uucp protocol by default for STARLAN connections is the "e-protocol" (error free data path). I would assume there is no, or very little, handshaking done here. The data path is assumed to be error free, and 1024 packets are shoveled down the line to the remote node. I needed a *big* file to test this with... A fairly large one was my news history file ... -rw-r--r-- 1 news news 2352055 Oct 14 23:27 /usr/lib/news/history Using the "e-protocol" this file went to my other machine, icusdvlp over STARLAN this fast! icusdvlp!root M (10/15-0:24:58) (C,2252,1) [starlan] -> 2352055 / 78.550 secs, 29943 bytes/sec Yes, 78 seconds over 2MB of file... Yes, and at 29943 bytes per second! That's bytes per second! I get about 1100 bytes per second on the average for a 19.2K Telebit Trailblazer connection! Then I switched to the "g-protocol" using a WINDOWS=7 uucico, and still using STARLAN transport medium. icusdvlp!root M (10/15-0:43:48) (C,2268,1) [starlan] -> 2352055 / 1045.800 secs, 2249 bytes/sec This took, about 17 minutes, quite a bit of a change. Now you see how much overhead the g-protocol uses. But still here it's twice as fast as my Telebit (and that's fast), and still faster than the 19.2K direct RS-232 connection, which was ~32 minutes (at WINDOWS=7) icusdvlp!root M (10/15-1:14:48) (C,2273,1) [tty000] -> 2352055 / 1942.834 secs, 1211 bytes/sec So I guess it's probably good to say that 78 seconds vs. 32 minutes is quite an improvement! Now what's in store for the future of my STARLAN. Well I'd like to write my own server. Maybe implement TCP/IP over the STARLAN ... I'd like to write a better "cu" for the thing, it's too slow to connect. Sending character by character isn't good either. Adding new services seems simple (even though I don't have a manual). Each service looks like it has an unique number, located in the /usr/net/nls/starlan/dbf file: 1:na:NULL,:/usr/net/servers/sl # Remote login 102:n:NULL,:/usr/net/servers/uucplogin # Mail/File transfer (This case it's 1 and 102). I could easily add another program, to do TCP/IP connections... Well I babbled on for long enough ... Take it easy all. -Lenny -- | Lenny Tropiano ICUS Software Systems [w] +1 (516) 589-7930 | | lenny@icus.islp.ny.us Telex; 154232428 ICUS [h] +1 (516) 968-8576 | | {ames,pacbell,decuac,hombre,sbcs,attctc}!icus!lenny attmail!icus!lenny | +------- ICUS Software Systems -- PO Box 1; Islip Terrace, NY 11752 -------+