Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!JASPER.Palladian.COM!dp From: dp@JASPER.Palladian.COM (Jeffrey Del Papa) Newsgroups: comp.os.vms Subject: LAVC help/info request Message-ID: <880104212145.0.DP@BANFF.PALLADIAN.COM> Date: 5 Jan 88 02:21:00 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: Jeffrey Del Papa Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 21 3 - Why does a DELNI cause communication through itself to fail when the only fault is on the thickwire to which it is connected? Is there any way to prevent this action? A DELNI merely provides a substitute for trancievers. In theory it is the same as having each machine with its own tranciever on the thickwire (in fact one of the vendors labels it equivalent box a 'tranciever fanout'). the device does not 'stage' or route packets for devices not on the delni, nor is it slower than having seperate trancievers (two common misconceptions) It does have a mode where it does not need a wire connected, so you could operate your cluster when they are servicing the thickwire by throwing the little switch on the front to separate yourself from the backbone while they work on it. otherwize the devices provide no special 'insulation' from the thick backbone. consider yourself lucky that your machine does something obvious and (by comparison) harmless as crashing. When you break the ether, a symbolics machine can destroy data on its disk. (we once lost our file server for the better part of a day, movers knocked a badly crimped connector loose, causing the file server to update the index file equivalent shifted 14 bits left.)