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

[Gregory Leblanc]

paul pries wrote:
> 
> 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

<IPX bias>
On a network with 700 nodes?  Ugh, that sounds ugly.  IPX is much easier
to configure than IP, you just plug in the computer, and you're done
with configuration.  Everybody knows where everybody else is.
</IPX bias>

> 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"?

Depends on how you configure devices and servers.  SAP doesn't have to
be noisy, or all that frequent.  

> How about NDS tree transfers? *grin*

O.K. these can be ugly, depending on how your replicas are set up.  I
don't REALLY know how all this works, since I haven't taken Netware
appart since 3.12.

> Ever tried to set up an IPX network over an ISDN
> connection?

No, but 28.8 dialup works ok.  :)

> Microsoft (yuck) networking is even worse...

Yeah, let's not even open that can of wyrms.

[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. 

Only that it's faster compared to older routers.  :)

> 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).

Would these be like the 7000 series?  We're going to need to replace our
2614s with something newer to handle routing of a 9MBit ATM pipe, in all
likely hood, and we're probably looking at a 7K, or perhaps a PIX.
	Greg