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From: morgan@JESSICA.STANFORD.EDU (RL "Bob" Morgan)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: Re: ATP2 bridging (was Phase 1 vs. Phase 2)
Message-ID: <MacMS.32747.25137.morgan@jessica.stanford.edu>
Date: 24 Jan 91 20:13:31 GMT
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Regarding the suddenly revived bridging-AT2-over-FDDI controversy, I offer two
comments:

1.  Anyone considering the relative difficulty of implementing JQ Johnson's
solution (two revs of drivers on zillions of machines whose users can't
possibly understand the problem) versus Jim Hayes's solution (a rather modest
hack on a small number of bridges) would have to agree that this is one case
where justice (ie, Apple should fix it, because they broke it) just isn't
practical.

2.  As I noted when this first came up last June, fixing AT2 AARPs is only one
more small hack in a vast swamp of obscure, nasty kludges that designers of
FDDI-Ethernet bridges (or any other heterogeneous-LAN bridges) will have to do
to make this fundamentally wrong idea saleable.  My expectation is that
eventually they (or their customers) will give up and use routers for this
purpose instead.

 - RL "Bob" Morgan
   Networking Systems
   Stanford


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