Turning an Ethernet into a WAN

[kma@SAMSON.cadr.amis.com (K. Mark Alexander)]

    Date: Mon, 15 Apr 91 18:02 EDT
    From: bill@ATHENA.PANGARO.dialnet.symbolics.com (Bill Wilkinson)

    I am looking for hardware and/or service recommendations in connecting
    Lispms and/or other machines on different Ethernets via telephone and/or
    other service. I want low cost point-to-point service, across town or
    maybe between different cities. I want the connection at the Ethernet
    level so I can route Chaos packets, IP packets, etc. Between Lispms, I
    want mail service and file service and a single namespace for both
    Ethernets.

    Given than I don't want to pay for a T1 or chunck thereof, or wait for
    ISDN to show up at my door, I figure that a 9600 bps (V.32) modem and
    the public telephone network are acceptable.

    I've looked at a few routing Ethernet bridges in the $2000 and up range.
    These are high performance devices that are made for higher speed comm
    media.  Thus the total hardware cost for bridges and modems for 2 sites
    is in the $6000 range. Are there any cheaper boxes out there that I
    should know about?

    Has anyone out there successfully connected multiple Lispms on separate
    Ethernets via routing bridges (locally or remotely)? 

    Can Genera software deal with slow data rates gracefully or am I going
    to find myself timing out at inconvenient times? What else do I need to
    know or what questions should I be asking?

    Has anyone implemented SLIP (serial line IP) for Lispms? I understand
    that there are commercial services out there providing IP data services
    at costs competitive with leased telephone lines.

    Thank you very much.

After looking into the cheaper dial-up solutions to this sort of thing
we decided to go leased-line using 2 gate-array lispms (sync-link) and
9600 baud v.32 modems (synchronous) at either end.  Dial-up ethernet
seemed a bit awkward because we wanted a "real" ethernet bridge that
would handle chaos and ip protocols while functioning the same as the
local protocols.  To do this as a dial-up would have meant hacking code.
We have found the leased-line/sync-link solution to be acceptable.  The
only drawback is making sure the users on the sync-link machines are
courteous about booting.