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Re: (ASCEND) P75 to USR Total Control MP+ or BACP



Hey Karl - I forgot this was *your* pet subject....should have waited for 
your assessment first....

At 05:27 PM 10/30/97 -0600, Karl Denninger wrote:
>
>ASCEND Pipelines appear not to know how to count bytes and divide by time.

OK, you got us....the secret is out....!

>(this is all you need to support DBA with any device of this type).  Proof
>of this is the SGI and other ISDN-capable devices which *do* DBA and don't
>need any silly protocol support for it.

DBA is not what they are trying to "solve". DBA actually runs in the
background
with respect to MP+ and BACP, and when a second channel is desired, the DBA
process sends a request to the MP process which then tries to determine how
to call the second channel - this is where the reliance on MP+/BACP comes
into the picture. It solves some of the (admittedly rare now) complexities
of what numbers to call..going beyond the simple options of "call the same 
number again" (which is not always possible), and "call the second pre-
configured number" (which does not allow any dynamic assignments on the
server 
side).

>Last time I checked, any general-purpose CPU could execute both addition and
>shift instructions (which is all you need to implement the above).

Even the "reduced instruction set...." CPUs ? ;)

>We've been saying this for a *long time* to ASCEND, and it has fallen on
>deaf ears.  Given the simplicity of implementing this capability, I can only
>surmise that this is a bald-faced attempt to influence the purchase of
>central-site hardware to which the Pipeline might connect.

Actually the process worked just fine with most servers out there - since the
majority were MAXen, and then the industry big players agreed that an MP+ like
protocol would be a neat idea (no one ever said *required* though). BACP was
born, *supported* by USR, Shiva, Cisco, Microsoft, 3Com and a few others who I
don't recall any longer. So it looked like supporting MP+ and/or BACP would be
OK - even if it was only a "neat idea" as opposed to "required".

We *ARE* going to allow DBA with plain MP connections in a future release. 

Kevin


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