Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!rmallett
From: rmallett@ccs.carleton.ca (Rick Mallett)
Subject: Rotting Routing Problem?
Message-ID: <1991Mar13.144404.20653@ccs.carleton.ca>
Organization: Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1991 14:44:04 GMT

I'm trying to get TCP/IP services to work on a network of 5 Apollo 
workstations running SR10.2 and I'm finding that the routing tables
on the hosts disappear a few minutes after booting the gateway even 
though "netstat -r" on the gateway shows it has a full routing table. 
All machines use Apollo Token Ring for Domain services - the gateway 
has an ethernet card as well which is connected to the campus network.
All 5 machines are setup to use name service (nmconfig -h hostent_bind)
from Suns on the campus ethernet (i.e. named is not running on the ATR).

There is a slight subtlety here. The machines are configured with an 
Apollo netid (set using netsvc) to isolate them from some other machines 
running SR9.7 on the same cable. I did this because I'm converting the 
net to SR9.7 but I don't want  to convert the SR9.7 registry since it 
contains hundreds of obsolete accounts and I want to start over with 
a new registry. I've been moving the currently active users one by one 
onto the new system and it has all been working fine up to now.

The point is that I don't want to install an Apollo Internet; in fact,
I don't want my 5 machines to know anything at all about the other nodes.
I do want my 5 nodes to see the real Internet. The manual "Managing Domain/OS 
and Domain Routing in an Internet" seems to assume that I want to set up an
Apollo Domain network and I'm not sure how much of it is relevant to my
problem. When I follow the instructions in "Configuring and Managing TCP/IP" 
I can't get the routing tables to stay around for more than a few minutes. 
If I boot the gateway node, it sends the Internet routing tables to the hosts 
which then function normally for about 10 minutes. After that "netstat -r" just 
hangs after printing the header or I get a message that no routing tables were 
found. If I sit on the gateway machine "netstat -r" always shows a complete 
routing table and I can ftp and telnet from there to anywhere in the world.

Summary:

1. ATR network with netid set to "e1" running SR10.2
2. Gateway configured with RING and ETH802.3_AT interfaces.
3. routed invoked with "-f -q" on hosts and "-f" on gateway.
4. nmconfig -h hostent_bind on all nodes to use campus ethernet name service.

Requirement: 
Advice on how to configure an Apollo Token Ring network to use TCP/IP services 
to access the Internet Internet (i.e not a Domain Internet). Any advice on how
to proceed to debug the problem myself would also be greatly appreciated.