Xref: utzoo soc.culture.british:11390 comp.protocols.tcp-ip:16396 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!uunet!mcsun!ukc!mucs!mccuts!zzassgl From: zzassgl@uts.mcc.ac.uk (Geoff Lane) Newsgroups: soc.culture.british,comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: IP in the UK (was Re: Fingering the English) Message-ID: <2871@mccuts.uts.mcc.ac.uk> Date: 5 Jun 91 13:08:53 GMT References: <1991Jun3.235516.7634@brolga.cc.uq.oz.au> <7957@ecs.soton.ac.uk> Organization: Manchester Computing Centre, Manchester, England, M13 9PL Lines: 42 In article <7957@ecs.soton.ac.uk> tjc@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Tim Chown) writes: >Here at Southampton our Electronics and Computer Science departmental >connections are all TCP/IP; we have 200+ nodes on our local network. >Now we're just about to have our campus network go live, and yes, it all >runs by Pink Book. Our Computing Services who will adminster this beauty >have had it imposed on them from above by some national committee. Yum. >Somewhere someone needs their head removing from their a**e !!! > Tim Aha! Another fan of the famous JNT! The glorious committee which insists that everyone uses Janet protocols and only now are being dragged kicking and screaming into the mid 1970's. We here at Manchester also have hundreds of TCP/IP equiped PCs and workstations. We run our own name servers etc but as soon as we want to talk to some other site its back to the good old Janet protocols across X25 lines. If it were cheaper, or quicker or more reliable then it would make sense - but it is not. In its time the Coloured book protocols were a worthwhile attempt to bring some kind of organisation to computer networking when there were few if any standards, but the world has rejected these ideas and gone for something different. It would make some sense if the Coloured Book protocol software was freely available to anyone on request but it isn't. I attempted to get hold of the Pink Book s/w in order to port it to a new Unix machine we installed. It appears that I have to ask Amdahl, the suppliers of the hardware and OS, to place a contract with the S/W developers to port Pinkbook to the UTS system (a version of Sys V Unix) and then I have to ask the JNT to provide funds so we can then buy the ported s/w from Amdahl! Soon the agony will be over. By October (or sooner) there will be no physical or technical reasons why the UK should not be fully connected to the Internet. If non-UK sites still cannot finger at least some UK based systems then it will be due to politics pure and simple. This flamette was brought to you by me the undersigned and only represents the views of the users - not the administration - of this centre ;-) -- Geoff. Lane. Janet: zzassgl@uk.ac.mcc.cms UTS Sys Admin, Manchester Computing Centre, Oxford Rd, Manchester, M13 9PL