[HECnet] DECnet et al

Bob, endnodes in different areas can only talk to each other if there's no router present. So your scheme only works if all of us shut down all our L1 and L2 routers. Once an endnode sees a router in its area it will send all its off-area datagrams to it. If that router is an L1 router then the other area is seen as unreachable. If it is an L2 router then it must see the other area router. I do need L1 routers (for DDCMP and DSSI circuits) and possibly others do too. Show net/old is neat and useful when systems are in different rooms ! Hans Verzonden vanaf mijn draadloze BlackBerry -toestel -----Original Message----- From: "Bob Armstrong" <bob at jfcl.com> Sender: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2011 08:21:12 To: <hecnet at Update.UU.SE> Reply-To: hecnet at Update.UU.SESubject: RE: [HECnet] DECnet et al Yes. But any L1 routers need help from L2 routers to get out of area. Yeah, but given that the routers aren't actually needed for two nodes to talk (under HECnet circumstances) then we don't actually need the routing nodes at all. Sounds like their only real use is to be able to do a "SHOW NETWORK/OLD" and see an nice list of active nodes (which is undeniably neat)... So a node configured as an end node in area 'n' can actually communicate directly, over Ethernet, with another end node in area 'm'? But a L1 routing node in area 'n', in the same physical network topology, would actually relay its packets for a node in area 'm' via an L2 router? And does this actually take two L2 routers to hand off the packets, one for area 'n' and one for 'm'? So (again, in the HECnet situation only) having an L1 router is a real penalty - where as two end nodes could talk directly, just changing the same machines to L1 routers would require the same traffic to be handled by two intermediate nodes. Or an I confused? That's a bit bizarre. Bob