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From: ron@TOPAZ.RUTGERS.EDU (Ron Natalie)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re:  Wollongong TCP/IP for VAX/VMS
Message-ID: <8707081702.AA03732@topaz.rutgers.edu>
Date: Wed, 8-Jul-87 13:02:57 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.8707081702.AA03732
Posted: Wed Jul  8 13:02:57 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 11-Jul-87 04:20:36 EDT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Distribution: world
Organization: The ARPA Internet
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Would you like to propose an alternative.  The other major
commercial offering (DTC/COMPION/GOULD/Whatever) ACCESS for
VMS is WORSE.  In addition the morons at the current company
(Internet Solutions or Network Solutions, I can't remember)
had little understanding of the internet at all.  Their primary
VMS worker kept insisting that when they got a name server
implementation working it would fix their broken routing
problems.  I posted a rather lengthy description of the problem
after that to the net and got some more calls from the management
of the company but the code never got fixed.

Woolengong, in addition to being blastedly expensive, falls short
of being useful.  In addition to having no name server support and
no mail system to speak of, their low level Ethernet kills the entire
system trying to ARP.  This happens when it receives broadcast datagrams
that it is trying to forward, or even if a host it has traffic for is
down.  It spurts a continuous stream of ARP's that never  get answered
which seem to be done at some priority that causes the VAX's to become
virtually unresponive.  Their inability to deal with any sort of broadcast
means we have to segregate them from nets with real hosts on them.
I frequently have to proxy arp for downed hosts when it is busy arping
for them and they aren't capable of answering.

Someday, someone will make a commercial VMS TCP offering that works
worth a damn, and when they do RUTGERS will immediately put it on
every single VMS machine we have (and we have a lot).

-Ron