Hi,

FTAM over OSI CONS wasn't too hard to set up using Solstice products on
Sun, nor with DECNET/OSI etc on OpenVMS. Although that was using a leased
line, dunno how much introducing ISDN complicates things. Not making
connections to a bank are you ? I know a system called Multicash
(IBM) that uses this lovely combination. Known some ICL apps use it too,
they we're hideous.

With the help of folks here before I've managed to get most of the last
free ISODE environment up on NetBSD, with working FTAM xfers. Im afraid I
dont have the modified source though. It would be nice if this got updated
so it worked well with NetBSD. Others may disagree. As for X.25, is there
a free userland implementation?

Cheers,

Andy

---
Andrew Back, UNIX Systems Engineer, boo.com.
	     Internet: andyb@boo.com
    X.400: C=GB; A=BT; P=BOO; S=BACK; G=ANDY	
--- 

On Fri, 5 May 2000, Erik Fair wrote:

> This sort of thing would be a whole lot easier if we had dmr's 
> streams (not to be confused with the evil abortion that ended up in 
> System V) in NetBSD. They're perfect for connection-oriented 
> networking.
> 
> Sounds like you have to do FTAM over OSI CONS on top of BRI ISDN. Nasty.
> 
> If it's easier to make an X.25 implementation work in userland, then 
> by all means start there. If we need to move it inside the kernel for 
> efficiency, performance, code sharing, whatever, we can do that 
> later, after we have an implementation that is known to actually work.
> 
> However, a word of warning from this old protocol geek - the CCITT 
> (excuse me, ITU-TSS) X.25 standards documents (unlike the TCP/IP 
> standards) do not specify a wire-line protocol as such; they specify 
> an interface (the network, after all, is owned by PTTs who don't want 
> you to know what they do behind that interface). As if that weren't 
> bad enough, the language in the documents is awful - like legalese 
> translated from some alien language, poorly.
> 
> To make an X.25 implementation really work, you're going to have to 
> test against existing implementations for interoperability, and 
> adjust your code for variances in the other implementations.
> 
> Fortunately, the last time I had anything to do with an X.25 network 
> was 1996, so take some of my comments with a grain or two of salt - 
> things may have improved in the interim.
> 
> 	Erik <fair@clock.org>
>