5494, frame relay, and parms...

We have 20+ 5494's that we just converted from a private pt to pt network
to a frame relay (unfortunately ATT).  We have implemented this by
attaching the 5494's to their ethernet LAN's and having a router connect to
the frame relay cloud.  Locally, our AS/400 is attached to the ETH LAN and
there is also a router here connected to the FR network.

To the AS/400 and the 5494's they look like they are attached to a LAN.  We
are bridging the SNA traffic.  It works fairly well except that we are
having a higher rate of outages than ever before.  The WAN people believe
that the WAN is ok, the LAN people believe the LAN is ok.  We are working
on improving our ability to diagnose both environments.  Outages are short
5 seconds to 4 minutes in general.  The frequency of occurence is probably
an order of magnitude greater than it was before.

In the meantime, I wanted to see what anyone might have to think about this
kind of environment and certain configuration parameters.  I've centered my
attention around frame size, lan frame retry, lan response timer, lan
inactivity timer, lan ack frequency, and lan max outstanding frames.  TBH,
I have not found much help in the manuals regarding these parms in a
bridged FR environment.  Right now my parms are, respectively, 1033, 20,
30, 250, 4, and 4.

Anyone have any ideas?  It has been my belief that in a bridged environment
the answer was a 'it depends' and not any one configuration would work for
everyone.  However, I would definitely would entertain anyone's thoughts
and experiences.... I have toyed with the idea of tinkering more with the
parms above (like reducing frame size) but would like to apply a structure
around this and hopefully approach it logically.....

BTW, thanks for all the suggestions on WMS.  They have all been very
helpful and are being pursued....thanks....


Michael Crump
Technical Project Leader


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