ken@cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman) (04/11/91)
As a way to plan a possible V3.0 configuration, a few users have recently been playing with isis_remote under V2.1 (presumably to decide how big the backbone network should be). There turns out to be a problem with performance (because most people can't use BYPASS under V2.1) and with failure detection (due to a minor problem in isis_probe), and so these experiments are generally not very successful. I recommend that people wait for V2.2 if they want to play with remote connections under the free version of ISIS. We have done a lot to improve isis_remote under V3.0, and performance is very close to that of a local connection for this release of ISIS, so fairly small backbone systems (3-6 nodes) will often be adequate even for a large network. Thus, even if your network has a hundred machines, you will probably see perfectly good performance using isis_remote (actually, isis_remote_init) from 96 of them. This will also save you a lot of money. I do have the bug fix for isis_probe; the other problem was in cl_inter.c and was posted quite a while ago, but I can repost it if anyone urgently needs this. Both problems are minor, but taken jointly, they involve a bit too much editing for me to feel comfortable recommending. The earliest release date for V2.2 is now late summer or early fall. We are just swamped with other activities and aren't finding time to work on this. But, we will do it as soon as things calm down, and they always do calm down eventually. -- Kenneth P. Birman E-mail: ken@cs.cornell.edu 4105 Upson Hall, Dept. of Computer Science TEL: 607 255-9199 (office) Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (USA) FAX: 607 255-4428