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From: childers@avsd.UUCP (Richard Childers)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.modems,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Wide Area Networks
Message-ID: <443@avsd.UUCP>
Date: 28 Jan 89 01:42:31 GMT
References: <6900@killer.DALLAS.TX.US>
Reply-To: childers@avsd.UUCP (Richard Childers)
Organization: die Edelstahlratte
Lines: 52

phil@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Phil Meyer) writes:

>We are going to open a branch office in another city.  The branch office
>MUST be 'online' with the main office.  It would be ideal if RFS could
>run over a wide area network.  Has anyone done this?  Did you use modems,
>or a faster method of communications?

I'm assuming RFS is analogous to NFS, in that it's made to work over the
local ethernet connecting workstations.

At a previous site, I was on the fringes of such an issue, and generally,
it was felt that there were wide-bandwidth devices that utilized 56kb-wide
leased channels from the phone company, which could be gated through a box
to put it [back] onto the ethernet.

More recently, at another location, we had a remote office that was line-
-of-sight with our present office, and there is hardware which translates
ethernet packets to T1 packets, and other hardware that feeds T1 packets
into the microwave horn. T1 may the the magic phrase that will unlock
doors, in your problem.

Where I am now, we are discussing line-of-sight lasers for linking the
buildings - as well as the more common fiber optic cable.

>This seems like a trivial matter to me, but the hardware vendors we deal
>with are balking at the idea, and one suggested that duplicate data sets
>be maintained at both sites with batch updates/exception reporting.

That might be cost-effective. So might maintaining a private PBX/CBX which
you could use to login to the local database from remote locations, as well
as have one phone system connecting both sites and save long-distance bills.

>Any ideas are welcome.

Mind meld !!!	(-:

>One last note:  This client will PAY what it takes to do the job, yet
>the reps we talk to always consider costs first, even to the point of
>omitting information on some products because they are 'too expensive'.
>There must be ways to solve the WAN problem, but have the reps omitted
>something important again?

T1.

-- richard


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