🚀 go-pugleaf

Pieter:

> I'm addressing this to info-appletalk as well for the question about
> large institutions.

I won't answer for Greg, but there's a big institution around here
somewhere . . .

>     I believe that with a FastPath 2 running KIP the number of entries
> available in the routing tables is 64.  What is the number for a
> FastPath 4 running either KIP or K-STAR?

KIP is KIP, no matter what hardware it's running on, so it's always
64.  (Limits for other resources are described in the kip/doc/limits
file in the KIP distribution.)  For K-Star, the answer I've always
heard is "many".

>     We've currently got a hodge-podge of people running their own KFPS
> boxes here and are trying to consolidate the administration under the
> guise of connectivity.  However, the University of Utah is large
> enough that we'll eat up all 64 entries fast (we've already got
> somewhere around 30-40 net numbers).  What are other large
> institutions doing to resolve this problem?

At Stanford we discovered we had 63 nets in our main atalkatab a year
ago, and went into serious head-scratching mode.  We ended up coercing
various elements of the U into running their own atalkads, thus
creating multiple non-intercommunicating AppleTalk Internets (ATIs).
We now have about 150 Kboxes on campus.

This partitioning has its pluses and minuses.  We partitioned off the
student Mac clusters into their own ATI, which made various
administrators feel more comfortable about their LaserWriters.  On the
other hand, our publications office would like their fancy
phototypesetter to be Chooser-accessible campus-wide, and it cain't be
done, much to their upset.

We do in any case keep our AT net numbers consistent across the campus
(mostly . . .) by assigning them automatically via our host
registration database.  We generate the atalkatabs automatically from
the database, too.

>     Also, are the routes cached?  Does every bridge have to know about
> every other bridge all the time, or can there be more nets than
> entries in any one box's routing table?

Sadly, every route to every net in the ATI has to be present in every
router (bridge in AppleSpeak).  In a large ATI boxes can spend quite a
bit of time just keeping one another up to date.

Looking at RTMPs and ZIPs on our nets with a Sniffer, as I've been
doing recently, seems to be a good introduction to Chaos Theory.
We've been having weird trouble recently with routes that, despite
being properly defined in the atalkatab and having nice healthy Kboxes
at their ends, simply fade away.  ZIP requests for the affected net
numbers zoom madly about campus.  Zones disappear, users complain,
network managers go home early . . . *8^)*

 - RL "Bob" Morgan
   Networking Systems
   Stanford