Re: Leased Line vs. ??? -- MIDRANGE-L

You need an IBM partner in Hawaii that you have a high level of confidence 
in, so that when something goes wrong at the remote site, they can have tech 
support on site the same day.  You need to pick one that knows 400 PC & 
telcom, so that one place can service everything, and avoid any finger 
pointing between computer stuff & phone stuff, or someone who knows PC but 
not 400.

Our remote site connection is
1. VPN arrives at a Cisco box & the signal gets split into various systems
2. One system is our twinax 5250 stuff in which we use a Perle box

The system that is not 400 but rather LAN involves direct connection of our 
web site (see my SIG) to the Internet.  That ISP goes down far more often 
than I think is reasonable.  I am accustomed to 99.999 % IBM up time & 
perhaps lose 2-4 hours a month of ma bell LL connect time, but for an ISP to 
go down for several days at a time every few weeks - that sounds to me very 
bad.  My co-workers disagree - they think that the price is right & paying 
for better ISP support is not justified.

The ISP downage has not affected the 400 side of our operations, just the 
ability of our PC users to connect to the Internet & the fact that when it is 
down, all business-related e-mail is returned to senders with the erroneous 
error message that whatever address they were sending to at Cen_Elec is not a 
valid e-mail address, and any new people trying to access our web site do not 
get error message that the ISP is down, instead they get error message that 
our URL is no good.

Also, against my advice, the LAN is on an external NT box, and it does not 
measure up to IBM up-time performance, although I am happy that another 
employee is administering all of that.

The 5250 stuff & the Perle THINK they are talking on the old leased line 
modem.
There are models of Perle available that support 5250 & PC off of the same 
box.

At the 400 end, the signal that goes from communication line to VPN ... it 
thinks it is talking to a modem ... the Cisco box is emulating what we used 
to have on LL.

Our network includes 5250 display stations with cheap PC printers as their 
printer session.  These are for 400 users (on PC or twinax) who need 400 
spooled reports infrequently.  In one case we have maxed out twinax addresses 
on a daisy chain through a group of offices & have more than one daisy chain 
there.  One person is in an office with maximum display sessions, and PC 
printer connected through hole drilled in wall to 5250 monitor next door on a 
different daisy chain - where that station does not need as many display 
sessions.

The LAN side is like our remotes actually at several sites via VPN, but the 
400 thinks all the stuff on the LAN is local, in which NT tells OS/400 what 
the work station addresses are ... we use XXX#### where XXX are initials of 
user of PC ... e.g. JSW0005 is session # 5 of Jason Scott Waller's PC.

Alister William Macintyre 


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