Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!ucbvax!NSIPO.NASA.GOV!medin
From: medin@NSIPO.NASA.GOV ("Milo S. Medin", NASA ARC NSI Project Office)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Dbridge and Multinet
Message-ID: <8908301925.AA00982@cincsac.arc.nasa.gov>
Date: 30 Aug 89 19:25:14 GMT
References: <8908301822.AA23592@ames.arc.nasa.gov>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 16


Speaking as a site which used to run dbridge (a skeleton in my closet), I
can assure you that you don't want to do that unless it's really the only way.
The performance is not very good, and is much worse that DECNET over IP.
The reason is that in current software releases of VMS, you can't
get at the raw datagram layer of DECNET, so you have to set up a TCP
level DECNET connection and throw IP packets down that pipe.  In the other
case (DECNET over IP), the DECNET packets are wrapped up in UDP packets
and sent with very little overhead.  

I believe MultiNet is shipping production versions of both now.  I thought
TWG was as well (my experience with dbridge was years ago using TWG
software)...

						Thanks,
						   Milo