🚀 go-pugleaf

The manufacturer of our routers has made a very strange claim
concerning their implementation of AppleTalk. I think I can cite the
passages in Inside AppleTalk which show that they are just implementing
this incorrectly, but I could use a direct quote from a Tech Note or
Inside AppleTalk, or an answer from an Apple person, which would show
definitively that they are wrong, or alternatively that I am wrong and
the router folks are correct.

The folks who make our routers make the following two claims:

1. A "router" is not a "node". Nodes and routers are distinct sorts of
things.

2. Since a router is not a node, if a router is a seed router, it need
not dynamically acquire a node ID but can instead have one statically
assigned, since a seed router has statically assigned port descriptor
information.

I am trying to configure the backbone network that the routers share
with the campus backbone so that all of the routers are seed routers.
Because of this, two of my routers are trying to use identical node
IDs, which all in all is a very bad thing.

Am I totally confused, or is it true that:

(a) A router is in fact a node.

(b) Because a router is a node, it should follow the rules for node
number acquisition.

Any authoritative source on this would be greatly appreciated.

chris

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Christine R. Gressley
Research Programmer                      internet: gressley@uiuc.edu
Beckman Institute, UIUC                     phone: (217) 244-6691
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