Zane, While HP says they do not support Alpha's as area routers it works just fine. Bob Armstrong runs CHARON:: (an Alpha) as an area router. I suspect that HP did this to encourage migration to IA64, and thus kill off Alpha even sooner. -Steve Am I remembering correctly that in order to have a DECnet Phase IV area router you need to be running a VAX? Can Phase V act as an area router? I'm contemplating figuring out what Alpha has the lowest power requirements, and bringing it online in place of MONK (a very power hungry XP1000 with plenty of external drives). Then again a VAX would probably pull even less. Believe it or not, the "killer app" that I'm having a hard time living without is DEC Document. Zane