Sun and 4.3 networking: a clarification

[steve at mimsy.UUCP]

Someone inside of Sun has pointed out to me that in many ways my recent
(small?) flames at Sun for not providing 4.3 networking were somewhat
misleading.  Sun has admittedly done quite a lot in terms of cleaning
up their part of the collective 4.2-derived-networking act.  They have,
in fact, done the following:

	SunOS 3.2: name server (accessed through yellow pages, but
		*much* better than nothing), new rlogin and telnet,
		other bug fixes.  Shipping since last October or so.
		(By the way, does anyone outside of Sun have the 3.2
		SUNSRC distribution, and how did you get it?)

	SunOS 3.3: subnet support, including 4.3 ifconfig and routed.
		Started shipping in the last few weeks.  (Ditto on
		sources.)

	Future Minor Release: TCP and ICMP fixes from 4.3 (yay!)

	Future Major Release: Support for multiple protocol families.
		This, at least, I think I implied.

   As another person inside Sun stated, the 4.3 release hit at a very bad
time in terms of Sun's schedules, and that's been somewhat of a stumbling
block.  In some ways, I don't like to accept things like this, but I
will certainly admit that there are some practical matters in terms of
shipping and the like that are hard to change.

   Somewhat of an aside:we have had problems getting source for post-3.0
releases, and we cannot run any OS for which we do not have source.
As I mentioned above, I'd like to hear (mail only, please!) what experiences
other people have had in terms of getting (or not getting) Sun sources,
so that I can see what if anything we're doing wrong.

   My personal bias (and I don't try to hide this from anyone)
is that I would like a version of SunOS that has all the 4.3 networking
code merged in with the Sun code.  In fact, I would like this so much
that I have done it twice.  However, that is *my* personal bias/problem,
and I should have made that clearer at the outset.

   To summarize, Sun deserves a clarification of what they have done
in terms of fixing the known 4.2 networking problems.  Many other vendors
have done much less, and I think that Sun's efforts show that they
are concerned about and are trying to do something about the possibly
4.2-related problems on the Internet.  I was most certainly in the
wrong for not making Sun's efforts clear, and I apologize for not
doing so.

   Hey, if I didn't think they were good, I'd suggest to my superiors
that we buy someone else's equipment.  In fact, I do the opposite.

	-Steve


-- 
Spoken: Steve Miller 	ARPA:	steve at mimsy.umd.edu	Phone: +1-301-454-4251
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USPS: Computer Science Dept., University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742