🚀 go-pugleaf

In reply to W. N. Naegeli

Since I am somewhat of a novice at this form of communication (only
having a link to the Internet for about four months), I can offer only
some speculations concerning your difficulty in sending mail to this
site (charis.chem.rpi.edu). As far as I know charis has an entry in the
NIC host list (128.113.21.10); most mail postings come direct, except those
that come through BITNET gateways. Perhaps your site has not updated the
/etc/hosts file recently... if not, this would explain your transcript
of "Host unknown". You might try jtwarden%charis.chem.rpi.edu@itsgw.rpi.edu.

In answer to your queries concerning our network, our stars are passive and
are separated by about 200 feet. They are directly linked.
The spokes vary in length from about 50 feet to 200 feet with the
terminating resistors at the end of the spokes. The FastPath4 is a
spoke of the "Eastern" star, located ca. 20 feet from the punch block and
is situated in an electronics rack containing the Proteon gateway. We
have not had problems with nodes not seeing other nodes. We are using
a MacPlus/DataFrame combination as an AppleShare File server with
print spooling via LaserShare. Network traffic sometimes becomes heavy
when a number of jobs sre spooled (especially when the spooled LaserWriter
Plus receives an "illegal" PostScript command); communication through the
FastPath slows down dramatically. However, if I run TrafficWatch I
observe typically about 100 length errors in 20,000 packets - which
I think is quite acceptable. Ideally we should add another AppleTalk
zone, but as typical for academic institutions we are financially
hindered.

I hope this information helps you. If any of this is unclear, you should
know that I am a physical chemist (laser/magnetic resonance spectroscopy)
that got involved in networking by accident...I wanted to connect my lab 
instrument computers to those in my office and ended up networking a
department.


Joseph T. Warden
Department of Chemistry
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY 12180

Internet: jtwarden@charis.chem.rpi.edu (128.113.21.10)
BITNET: jtwarden@rpitsmts