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

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, December 22, 1999 at 08:58:20 (+0100), Bjrn Ramqvist wrote: ]
> Subject: [SunRescue] LAN Commmunication (was Sparc 10 cover plates)
>
> I mean, imagine a WinNT network where EVERY machine thinks it needs to
> know EXACTLY where every machine is, it's status, it's wifes name, it's
> social security number, the color of your dogs eyes and so on - this
> must be a problem. Just "keeping up" the LAN is almost rendering itself
> useless.

Remember the good old days when everyone warned you against running such
horrendous protocols like the old Unix rwhod?  :-)  If you didn't watch
out it would make your network crawl to a halt!  Oooooh!  Scarrrry!
 
On a slightly related note I found a "tech note" on NCD's site that
purported to be about traffic engineering an Ethernet LAN for X11
workstations and such.  I didn't actually read it though.....   :-)

BTW, just exactly how many of you folks who are running big networks
regularly get out the calculators (or spreadsheets! ;-) and work out
exactly when and where you have to add in new switches and routers?  :-)

I actually watch the traffic stats on all the ethernet ports on my
switch and on each server and workstation, etc., (with SNMP), and even
with all that SNMP traffic, my regularly busy e-mail server, DNS, X11 to
a few workstations, including xclock with second hands on each, NTP,
WWW, remote ping traffic watching my client sites, lots of telnet
typing, the occasional NAS audio stream, NFS to my diskless workstations
and NFS between the development servers, etc., my little network is
extremely boring!  ;-)  It is kind of handy though to debug problems
because I can spot abnormal traffic patterns just by watching the
blinking lights, and I can usually identify the culprits by comparing
the traffic graphs for the switch ports and for each computer itself.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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