SNA/NetBIOS over VPN (was: sugestion (fwd))

[TC Wolsey]

> Tina Bird <tbird at PRECISION-GUESSWORK.COM> 02/04/00 04:13PM >>>
>Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 04:02:22 -0800 (PST)
>From: emran mahat <ranhat007 at yahoo.com> 
>To: tbird at precision-guesswork.com 
>Subject: sugestion
>
>Hi Tina,
>
>First I would like to congratulate you for maintaining
>such good/informative web site on VPN.I would like to
>make some suggestions here.After brousing tru your web
>site I found there is no/lack of information on how
>SNA/netbui application can work on VPN.As we all know
>SNA and netbui is not routable.So there are might be
>many possibility/aproach that can solve that problem.I
>am grateful and happy if you can come up with
>discussion on this.Thanks for your precious time.
>
>regards
>--ran

You are correct that NetBIOS assumes a flat addressing and name space. I do not know that the same can necessarily be said for SNA but I am far from an expert. The main problem that I have seen with SNA/NetBIOS apps over a dispersed network is that they typically have various timers that have default values that are suitable for a local area network, for instance. Access to these timers is not always easy and in some cases changing the communication pacing values may not be feasible. As VPN techonology seems to be increasingly IP-centric the first techonology that I would suggest investigating would be DLSw, as that is a standardized method for the transport of SNA/NetBIOS over an IP infrastructure. The capability of DLSw to make a complex topology appear flat to the SNA/NetBIOS end stations is the approach that you can use to circumvent the lack of hierarchy in the address space. The capability of DLSw to locally acknowledge data-link sessions at the DLSw boundary is a workaround for the absolute timers issue. (Well, some of time anyway). Hope some of this helps.

Regards,

tcw

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