name resolution

[Liam Proven]

On 25 November 2017 at 17:58, Ken D'Ambrosio <ken at jots.org> wrote:
>
> IPX was a disaster at scale.  The fact that everything was routed by the
> unique card address (the name of which escapes me, but it was akin to an
> Ethernet card's MAC) meant that each router had to know where *every device
> on every segment* was.  The routing tables went through the roof, fast.

I have to admit, I never ran very large IPX networks. My boss built a
4/5 floor 300+ station one, with an actual _thick_ Ethernet backbone
and mirrored servers under Netware 3 SFT. I  was too junior to be
allowed near that, back then!

> Vastly better to use a discovery protocol like... oh, I dunno, Bonjour, or
> other zero-conf variants.  ;-)

Heh.

> I was so happy when I got to turn down IPX
> on our network; running multi-protocol on DOS and Windows 3.x stacks had
> been a bit of a nightmare.  (Anyone remember the pre-Samba PC/NFS?  Loading
> drivers into "high" memory?)

Oh gods, yes. In fact I am working on a demo DR-DOS VM image right
now, and fighting such issues all over again. It's kinda fun
resurrecting knowledge dead and unused for 20+ years, but also a pain
-- like troubleshooting SCSI bus issues, when I was refurbishing my
vintage Mac collection for sale before leaving the UK in 2013/2014.

Joking about dancing widdershins under a fool moon while sacrificing a
_black_ chicken (white only if it's fast wide SCSI-2) ... and if you
have isolated everything and know that the IRQ, DMA, I/O port, cabling
and termination is fine, then it's the termination. Once you've fixed
that, there's only one place to look... it's the termination.

... was funny... until I actually had to do it again. :-/

> I haven't been following this thread, but after reading some of the e-mails,
> I'm afraid, Xen, that I have to back Liam, here.  He knows whereof he
> speaks.

Thanks!

-- 
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