The Montagar licenses include all the DECnet licenses. There is no reason to limit yourself (today) to endnode functionality. SHOW NETWORK(/OLD) gives useful information. I'm not sure what the router rules are. There are 63 areas, each with one actove area router. There may be more routers configured as an area router in one area; the one with the highest (?) DECnet address is selected as the active one. There are limits on the number of routers. There are counters in NCP, executer max circuits and exec maximum routers. On first generation VAX systems routing overhead was deemed too high. IMO this may be the case with 11/750's and slower but a MicroVAX II could easily keep up with the traffic on a LAN with more than 1100 decnet hosts in 8 areas. Hans Verzonden vanaf mijn draadloze BlackBerry -toestel From: "Steve Davidson" <jeep at scshome.net> Sender: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2011 11:23:46 -0400 To: <hecnet at Update.UU.SE> ReplyTo: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Subject: [HECnet] DECnet et al Mark, When I install DECnet on VMS I always use the DNVETRTG license. This way I do not have to care about the system's role - I may change it at will On another note, the node SGC:: is an emulated system that is always running as an area router. This way I always have a gateway to the rest of HECnet and the cost to run the system is minimal. DECnet has limits as to the total number of area routers so just adding a router may not be the best answer. The HECnet backbone is not at that limit yet... If you were to use an emulated system as a router then it would not matter which of the other systems you brought up - they would all be able to see the rest of HECnet. I should mention though that a cluster with a cluster alias MUST be a router. It can be a level-1 or level-2 (area) though... -Steve