[SunRescue] LAN Commmunication (was Sparc 10 cover plates)

[paul pries]

GLeblanc at cu-portland.edu wrote:
> 
> <novell BIAS>
> Is this an IP network, IPX, or something else?  All of the IPX/SPX networks
> that I've inherited have been HORRIBLY misconfigured, causing some really
> bad network performance.  However, if you take the time to set up every
> device properly when you put it on the network, routed IPX can be really
> fast.  No decent Unix implemntation that I've found yet though.  IP on the
> other hand would much rather be quiet, and is sometimes easier to get to
> behave.  But IP gives you all of this DNS and DHCP garbage, which you don't
> have to deal with on an IPX network.
> </novell BIAS>

You don't need to run DHCP, just assign static IP
addresses. Taken care 
of that part of the traffic, lets move on to DNS.
On a LAN without an
internet connection you could run without DNS.
Just use hostfiles.
Though, this is no option if you have a dynamic
network with a lot of
hosts changing places...
How about Novell? What kind of traffic do get with
Novell?
Well, isn't there a lot of "announcing services"?
How about NDS tree transfers? *grin*
Ever tried to set up an IPX network over an ISDN
connection?
Microsoft (yuck) networking is even worse...
> 
[snip]
> 
> You can't just add switches, because they only separate collision domains,
> but you can add routers to separate collision domains.  Everything I've
> heard about BGP4 for IP sounds really good, but I don't completely
> understand how it works yet.  Using it should keep maintence to a minimum,
> and allow for load balancing across multiple links.
> 

Switches separate collision domains, routers
separate broadcast
domains. This is a good thing to do when dealing
with larger networks.

[snip]
>
> 
> Our network is fairly quiet, with about 700+ nodes.  The majority of our
> traffic is headed for our internet connection, so it doesn't even get to the
> switches for our servers, which could be why I don't see any activity.  I'd
> check out 3Com, Cisco, and a couple of other people for "Layer 3 Switches",
> to see if you can't increase the number of broadcast domains, since it
> sounds like it's a fairly big problem.  Wow, something on the Sun list that
> I'm almost qualified to answer...  :-)

Feels good, doesn't it? *smile*
Layer 3 switching really is routing. The
difference is that only go
through the routing processor once. It works like
this:

When the first packet arrives from source A with
destination B it 
is fed through the routing processor to find out a
path between A and B.
The packet is checked against access lists to see
if A is allowed to
connect to B, and if every thing is OK a thread is
created between the
interfaces where A and B are connected. All
following packets that
belong to that thread are thereafter switched
through this thread.

Cisco has taken this one step further in their
bigger routers. They're
downloadning theappropriate parts of the routing
table to the 
interface processors, thus making it obsolete to
send the packet
to the main processor for a routing decision
(provided the interface
of the source and destination are on the same
interfacecontroller).

Paul.