Re: Network communication

[razzell%dosequis.cs.ubc.ca@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM (Dan Razzell)]

> We have a Symbolics 3640 connected on one subnet at the University
> I am at.  We have UNIX host that we wish to communicate with over
> IP/TCP that is on another subnet.
>
> ...
>
> We have found software in the network manual for a
>   TCP-GATEWAY CHAOS TCP-GATEWAY
> service.  We, however, do not have a LISP machine on the
> other subnet that can be the gateway on a CHAOS protocol.
>
> Is there a way to set up a TCP or UDP protocal gateway so that
> we can get to this other UNIX host?  Communication works fine
> to UNIX hosts that are on the same subnet; the problem is
> across subnets.

We found ourselves in the same situation, having interesting Unix
hosts on the other side of a gateway which is itself a Unix host.
Looking through the IP/TCP sources, it eventually became evident
that the following Service attribute needed to be added to the Host
namespace object corresponding to the gateway:

  Service: GATEWAY IP INTERNET GATEWAY

Of course, this is not documented.  See the "Symbolics IP/TCP Software
Package" manual for background. For reference, we are running Genera
8.0.1 with IP/TCP 4.0 (422.6 ECO level 1).

Check also that your Internet network namespace object has a suitable INTERNET-SUBNET-MASKS User Property.  This one is documented.

Hope this helps.  As more sites are forced to subnet, I'm sure this will
become a more significant concern to Symbolics maintainers.

				-*-

By the way, if you're running NFS and using the Yellow Pages
(now called NIS) across your subnets, you may well find that your
Lisp machine times out in "PMap GetPort" trying to connect to
an NIS server on another subnet.  Symbolics kindly gave me the
NFS sources and I was able to hack things so that at least the
YP-DOMAIN-SERVER User Property of the Site object overrides
the information inappropriately obtained from the network.  The
proper solution is to find an NIS server directly using broadcast
RPC, but I have yet to figure out how.  Any help would be appreciated.

My contact at Symbolics for this has been Meryl Cohen.  Rather than
send mail to her directly, please address your message as follows:

  "Meryl Cohen <customer-reports@yukon.scrc.symbolics.com>"

-- 
      .^.^.      Dan Razzell <razzell@cs.ubc.ca>
     . o o .     Laboratory for Computational Intelligence
     . >v< .     University of British Columbia
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