Sun-3 communication with Xerox using Ethernet ?

[steve at mimsy.UUCP]

In article <1690 at enea.UUCP> mats at enea.UUCP (Mats Josefsson) writes:
[stuff about wanting to talk between Suns and Xeroxes deleted]
>1. Get XNS for the Sun systems.  I know there is (limited)
>   XNS support in the BSD 4.3 distribution for the VAX.
>   Does anyone know if Sun is going to support XNS in any
>   future release of their os?  The Sun's that I have looked
>   at are 4.2 based and I couldn't find any references to
>   XNS in the documentation or elsewhere. We are BSD 4.3 
>   source licensees,  but I can't afford to try a port myself.

   It's not clear exactly what's going on with regard to Sun support
for XNS.  A NFS meeting last April said that SunOS 4.0 was going to
include 4.3BSD networking, and leaving out XNS would be, in my opinion,
silly.  It's also rumored that someone in the Sun Consulting group is
stuffing yet another XNS implementation into 4.2, so you might talk
to your Sun sales rep (or whatever other appropriate warm body seems
handy) about what if anything is being done in this area.  Some
Sun people have indicated (Usenix Sun BOF a month ago) that there
isn't demand for XNS on Suns, but I seem to answer a lot of questions
from people who want it...

   I have ported the whole of the 4.3BSD networking stuff (at the
kernel level, at least, plus some user-level programs) into a Sun
3.0 kernel.  I've had it more-or-less stable for a month now, but
while I had hoped to put more time into it (enough to turn it into
a product for everyone, not just wizards) it now appears that I
just won't be able to come up with that time.  I intend to do just a
little more work on my stuff, then make it available somehow to the
Internet community at large.

   I (and here I want to stress that "I" != "University of Maryland") am
really rather distressed at the time it has taken and will take for
Sun to get 4.3 networking into the hands of its customers.  The 4.2
networking implementation is, as I think we will all admit, seriously
deficient in some areas, and Sun hasn't corrected those deficiencies.
I know that Sun has their reasons (involving a product that doesn't
work under 4.3 networking), but I'd *love* to hear more details.
Anyone out there care to comment?

>2. Get TCP/IP for the Xerox machines. I have a (slightly 
>   outdated) version of the "TCP/IP vendors and implementations
>   guide" but there is no mention of any Xerox hardware or
>   software in it.

   There has been TCP/IP support in Interlisp for a while now, but
as I've never used it I don't know how good it is.  Xerox has also
done work recently to put a TCP/IP implementation into their XDE
5.0 release.  We've been a test site for this stuff for a long time.
The implementation is like many others in that it is good in some ways,
and bad in others.  It's certainly not going to work as a gateway without
modification, but it does understand subnets and there's some stuff
from ISI that lets it use the name server; that's more than a lot of
other vendors do!

   I recall a comment somewhere to the effect that TCP/IP will make
it into ViewPoint sometime around the 2.0 release.  Hopefully, your
Xerox vendor will have more information about when the different
Xerox TCP/IP implementations will be available.

>3. Get some sort of gateway/bridge which will do the conversion
>   between TCP/IP and XNS,  possibly using different LAN's.
>   This seems to be a really ugly solution.

   Yes, probably, but maybe a good thesis for someone.

>Mats Josefsson, ENEA DATA, Sweden
>
>UUCP: {seismo,mcvax,munnari,cernvax,diku,inria,prlb2,penet,ukc,unido}!enea!mats
>Internet: mats at enea.se

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