Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!hpda!hpcuha!aspen!laubach
From: laubach@aspen.IAG.HP.COM (Mark Laubach)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.isis
Subject: Re: Getting remote clients to talk to ISIS
Message-ID: <6860002@aspen.IAG.HP.COM>
Date: 2 Feb 90 19:34:13 GMT
References: <36643@cornell.UUCP>
Organization: HP Information Architecture Group - Cupertino, CA
Lines: 34


   I am thinking of extending ISIS V2.0 to support ISIS client
   applications running on workstations where the ISIS system itself is
   not up; such "children" would connect to ISIS at a "mother" machine.
   I believe that on a standard UNIX system, ISIS could probably support
   50 or 100 such children without much trouble.  The children would have
   transparent access to all ISIS facilities and could receive fast
   bypass multicasts in the normal way, but would depend on their
   connection to the mother machine for all of these features.

   Questions: do you know of applications where this would be useful?
   What sort of child hardware should be be thinking of (PC's under OS/2?
   Apple's?)  Can I count on UDP messaging?  TCP/IP?  Is it vital that
   ISIS switch transparently from one mother machine to another if the
   first one fails, or is this getting too fancy?

This would be a great idea.  That way, we could also possible have
participating non-UNIX OS implementations, like MS-DOS.  Also, on
diskless clusters, it would be easier to maintain having one ISIS
mother per filesystem server (cluster server) to reduce the
administrative overhead of running on each client CPU.

   This would be fairly easy for me to do for child "UNIX" systems,
   harder for non-UNIX systems (because the clib code does a few UNIX
   system calls).  What we do depends on the feedback we get...

DOS environments would be very useful to have integrated into this.

   My hope is to include something along these lines into the March beta
   release of ISIS V2.0.

Looking forward to V2.0.

Mark