Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] problem 'routing' AppleTalk zones
From: Stefan Bethke (stefan.bethke@hanse.de)
Date: Thu Apr 29 1999 - 20:24:43 EDT
--On Don, 29. Apr 1999 12:26 Uhr -0700 a sun <asun@saul6.u.washington.edu>
wrote:
> To have zones, you'll need a router. To have an AppleTalk router,
> you'll need at least two networks. Period.
>
> well, my patches also allow for single-interface routing. just use the
> -router flag instead of the -seed flag.
I exaggerated. Somewhat.
The point is: any scheme which produces zones (answers to ZIP GNI
requests), but doesn't provide RTMP messages (with sensibile contents) will
be leaving some nodes in a less-than-perfect state.
The AppleTalk protocol spec isn't quite verbatim on this subject, but if
you carefully read Inside AppleTalk, you'll realise that the protocol
designers never thought of any network without a router, but that does have
zones. Having zones simply *implies* having a working router, and I know
lots of systems that implement AppleTalk in a way that breaks when zones
appear with a network in the start-up range. This is not a problem with
the products, but with the protocol.
So, the best way to have zones without a router is to have a router. That
is, a system which pretends to be a router for a network which doesn't
really exist (in terms of hardware). Please note that this isn't just an
atalkd issue, you'll also need to be prepared to react sensibly on incoming
packets for this net (discarding counts as "sensible" in this case).
Stefan
-- Stefan Bethke Muehlendamm 12 Phone: +49-40-256848, +49-177-3504009 D-22087 Hamburg <stefan.bethke@hanse.de> Hamburg, Germany <stb@freebsd.org>
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