Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!rice!uw-beaver!ubc-cs!alberta!calgary!xenlink!blender!herb From: herb@blender.UUCP (Herb Peyerl) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo Subject: changing our net topology. advice needed. Message-ID: <90@blender.UUCP> Date: 11 Jan 90 15:39:59 GMT Lines: 60 We are in the midst of submitting a proposal to the big-wigs to obtain some more admin nodes and alter our network topology... Presently we have 42 Apollo's hooked up on three rings like so---> O-O-O however, we're buying approximately 30 new nodes in the next year and this will present us with a rather disgusting backup problem. So we thought we'd alter the topology to reflect 4 rings in box formation like so---> O-O | | O-O We figure that this way, if there was a gateway failure of any ONE of the four gateways, we'd still have network traffic between rings. My question(s) is/are: 1) Is the Domain routing smart enough to recognize that a gateway has gone down and automatically route packets the other way around??? 2) Is there any sort of special setup in the rtsvc or startups that we should do to reflect this topology and possibly account for the alternate routing??? 3) Is anyone doing this and have you ever experienced any rude and twisted problems with this sort of thing? 4) How good is TCP/IP for dealing with this sort of thing. I would think routed would handle this with relative ease. Unrelated Questions ------------------- 1) out of idle curiosity, how many nodes does each sys_admin at your site have to deal with? Should I feel justified in being stressed out with 42 nodes at the present time? Will I be near suicide when this figure approaches 80 nodes? 2) What're everyone's feelings and experience with Technet? We're having some rather disgusting problems with it and aren't overly pleased with the product. Of course we're running it on a DN3000 with 4 megs which is likely part of the problem. It only works about half the time and the Vax cluster likes to report the Apollo as being down whenever a Decnet operation is performed on the Apollo. 3) Does anyone have any insight as to when the 1.2 update of Technet is due? (Apollo?). Any help is greatly appreciated... I will summarize any interesting private replies that I get. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- UUCP: herb@blender.UUCP || ...calgary!xenlink!blender!{herb||root} ICBM: 51 03 N / 114 05 W || Apollo Sys_admin, Novatel Communications "The other day, I...... No wait..... That wasn't me!"