AT&T 3B* networking

[Prentiss Riddle]

Howdy.  I'm trying to educate myself enough about networking to make
some reasonable decisions regarding improving our connectivity around
this place.  Networking being a pretty arcane subject, I'm sure I can't
be the only person who is confused.  Since our hardware/software
environment is almost entirely AT&T, I'll display my ignorance and ask
my questions in this newsgroup. 

I gathered after interrogating some of our local AT&T technical and
sales folks that the following is a chart of what's available in the
way of networks for AT&T equipment:

	               Starlan        3BNet         TCP/IP
	              ---------     ---------      ---------
	AT&T 3B15        no         yes (RFS)      yes (RFS)
	AT&T 3B2      yes (RFS)     yes (RFS)      yes (RFS)
	AT&T 3B1      yes (RFS)        no             no
	AT&T 6386        yes           no             no
	DOS clone        yes           no             no

A hitch that you can't see in this chart is that RFS (Remote File
Sharing) can't be used between different kinds of networks.  That means
that while Starlan can give you RFS between a 3B2 and a 3B1, and either
3BNet or TCP/IP can give you RFS between a 3B15 and a 3B2, there's no
way to do RFS among all three. 

Questions:

(1) Is all of the above correct? 

(2) I was under the impression that 3BNet was essentially UUCP on top
of TCP/IP.  I gather that the TCP/IP column refers to non-AT&T TCP/IP
(Wollongong, perhaps).  What is the difference between that and 3BNet? 

(3) I have some experience as a user of 4.2BSD NFS, and know about
"rcp", "rsh", ".rlogin" files, etc.  Does that bear any resemblance to
RFS?  How can I find out what RFS looks like to the user and to the
administrator (especially security features)? 

(4) How does RFS interact with my plain old System V mail software? 

(5) The cells of the above chart marked "yes" without "(RFS)"
apparently refer to the ability of Starlan to let a 3B2 or a 6386 act
as a file server for DOS machines.  Correct?  Does this interfere with
the use of Starlan to provide RFS and other goodies among Unix
machines? 

(6) Is there some basic document, article or book I should read so all
this will be clear to me and I won't have to ask silly questions? 

Please send obvious answers that everyone should know to me by mail,
and I will summarize if there is interest.  Long, well-written tomes
of general interest can be posted directly to this newsgroup.  Thanks.

-- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.")
-- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer.
-- riddle%woton.uucp at cs.utexas.edu  uunet!ut-sally!cs.utexas.edu!woton!riddle