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From: tcp-ip@ucbvax.ARPA
Newsgroups: fa.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: TCP/IP for System V (responses)
Message-ID: <8398@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 22-Jun-85 01:03:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8398
Posted: Sat Jun 22 01:03:06 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Jun-85 03:24:54 EDT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.ARPA
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 33

From: mark@cbosgd.ATT.UUCP (Mark Horton)

It is certainly not true that UNIQ is the only game in town for TCP/IP
for a System V VAX.  Here are some others:

Excelan: we tried their product and gave up in disgust.  The guy who
wrote it tells me it will only run on a VAX 750; I can vouch that
it does NOT work adequately on a 785.  It came up far enough to show
that the list of obvious bugs that should have been caught immediately
is quite long.  Cost: $5000 for the software, plus you have to
buy their board.  (TCP/IP runs on an 80186 in the board, which offloads
the host but creates a bottleneck communicating with the host via the
Unibus, and makes a gateway impossible.)  The code is based on Berkeley
4.1aBSD, which is not very close to 4.2.

The Wollongong Group: we wound up being an unintentional beta test site.
Their stuff works (although installation is nontrivial) and has a few
rough edges.  They tell me the final product (which we don't have yet) 
cleans up these problems.  Cost: an outrageous $15,000 for the first machine
and $6,000 for each additional machine at the same geographic site.
(This is probably why Uniq raised their prices suddenly.)  The code
is based on Berkeley 4.2 and seems pretty compatible.  rwho even works,
complete with a load average!

CMC: I don't know much about them, as I have never met a customer.
Their boards are like Excelan's but use a 68K on the board.  Price
is about $4,000 for hardware and software combined.  Excelan sounded
this good a year ago, however, so caution is advised.

3Com: we have their UNET code ported to System V in AT&T, it runs on
Vaxen as well as various 3B's.  3Com has discontinued this product
and the AT&T port is not available on the outside (and probably never will
be, it works but Berkeley's is much better) so you can't get it.