TCP/IP Networking -- how do you make it work?

[Larry Williamson]

In article <497 at litle.litle.com> tom hampton writes:
 > 
 > We have been banging away trying to get heterogeneous networking
 > over TCP/IP going at our shop.  We keep running into little snags,
 > we find problems and trudge on.  So, I ask:
 > 
 > 1) Who out there is doing heterogeneous networking using
 >    Unix and other TCP/IP implemenations?

We are.

 > 2) Is anyone having success doing networking on 386's?  If so, whose
 >    TCP/IP package are you using on the 386?

Great success. The 386/ix systems use Interactive's Host Based TCP/IP
package with Western Digital EtherCard+ (aka WD8003). We are currently
using 386/ix 2.0.2 and TCP/IP 1.2.0, (this tcp/ip upgrade fixes some
pretty ugly bugs that were in the 1.1.x release). 

 > 3) Do you have any specific advice on how we get this going faster?  For
 >    example, should we have a LAN analyzer (which one?) should we stick 
 >    with a certain box for development (Sun?)

We've never needed a lan analyzer, though I've evaluated the package
from ftp software and it looks good.

I'm not sure what you mean by the second question (stick with one
box). But if you are asking if the non 386 machines can be a mixed bag
of goodies, then I would say mix and match all you like. We have quite
a few different types of machines on our network, 386's, 68030's, MIPS
RISC machines, DOS machines, they all work very nicely together. (There
are even a few QNX machines, but they don't work so well). We also
use CMC transervers for terminal servers.

We are using the r commands (rlogin, rsh, rcp, etc), and telnet, and
NFS and RFS (on the 386's only, of course).

 > 4) Does anyone recommend building a TCP/IP module for general purpose
 >    use -- something that hides some of the complexity of the Berkely
 >    socket interface?

We've not found a need to do this. Especially because the applications
we write must run on quite a few different machines. It is easier to
just work with the socket library.

 > 5) Do people hire consultants to do this sort of work??  Do you 
 >    recommend anyone in particular?

No.

A few comments. Everything went together pretty well for us here. Mind
you, we started out small (1 small 286 running Microport, 3 years ago)
with 4 casual users. We have grown steadily and added hardware a piece
at a time. The step to ethernet was pretty easy. No major headaches.
I've not got all the pretty bells and whistles in place that I'd like,
nntp is not up, intermachine email works, but needs some fleshing out
are two examples. But the basic network is solid as a rock (well, how
about, solid as clay). We get weird crashes, to be sure! But that only
happens when there is a critical deadline at hand :-)

-larry