kwe@bu-it.bu.edu (Kent England) (01/11/91)
In article <31375@boulder.Colorado.EDU>, Tim.Raymond@UVM.EDU (Tim Raymond) writes: > > We have many Ungerman Bass NIUs sitting on subnets. The subnets are > connected by a cisco AGS router. We have the NIUs configured to > resolve names using DNS. We are running UB Netone Software Ver. 16.1. > Our AGS is running 8.0(13) -- soon to be 8.2(1). > > The problem: > For names in the DNS db, all is well (the correct address is found). > For names not in DNS: > For two NIUs on the same subnet, all is well (the correct > address is found.) > For two NIUs not on same subnet, the name > is not resolved to an address. > > Whatever UB NIUs send out to resolve names is not getting passed by > the cisco box. You are correct. Before TCP, U-B used their own variant of XNS. When they offered TCP/IP, they did not convert all of their s/w to TCP from XNS. Obviously, you can't boot an NIU from pre-TCP PROMs using TFTP. One of the features U-B left in their TCP s/w was their old name resolution protocol. Since this is a non-IP protocol, the cisco will not pass it across subnets. Within a subnet, the old name resolution protocol works just fine. I believe 16.1 tries DNS first and then U-B resolution. This means your local collection of NIUs does not need a PC based name server to interoperate amongst themselves. Neat. cisco XNS may be compatible with U-B XNS, in which case you could assign XNS addresses and route XNS on your multiprotocol net. Or you can find out what the Ethernet type code of the U-B name query is and bridge that across the ciscos. Beware, it's an Ethernet broadcast query. --Kent