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From: jln@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (John Norstad)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: Campus AppleTalk Internet Strategies
Message-ID: <722@casbah.acns.nwu.edu>
Date: 22 Oct 90 19:40:35 GMT
Sender: news@casbah.acns.nwu.edu
Organization: Northwestern University
Lines: 36

At Northwestern University we are currently experiencing explosive growth 
in both our IP and AppleTalk internets.  We have several dozen IP networks 
joined together with Cisco routers and PC routers, plus several dozen 
AppleTalk networks.

I have been relying heavily on Shiva FastPath 4 boxes and atalkad 
tunneling to join together AppleTalk networks into one big campus 
AppleTalk internet.  This strategy is currently working very well, and 
we're quite happy with it.  We also have a number of Caymen Gatorboxes on 
campus, and I hope to also have them participate in atalkad tunneling, 
although I haven't been able to get it to work yet.

My problem is that I'm beginning to worry about various limits in atalkad. 
According to my ancient KIP documents, and according to the output of 
atalkad -c, I'm approaching some of these limits.  The documented limits 
are 256 bytes for all zone names (I'm up to 191 bytes), 32 zones (I'm up 
to 16), and 64 routes (I'm up to 27).

My first question is:  Are these limits absolute?  Is there any way to 
increase them?

My second question is:  What are the reasonable alternatives to atalkad 
tunneling for building a large campus AppleTalk internet?  I know that 
Cisco routers can do AppleTalk routing, but PC Routers can't.  Replacing 
all of our many PC routers with Cisco routers would be very nice for many 
reasons, and we'd all like to do it, but it's just too expensive.  
Replacing all of our FastPaths by Gatorboxes or vice-versa is also out of 
the question.

I know that other universities have very large AppleTalk internets.  How 
do you do it?

John Norstad
Academic Computing and Network Services
Northwestern University
jln@casbah.acns.nwu.edu