name resolution

[Ken D'Ambrosio]

>> IPX was a disaster at scale.  The fact that everything was routed by 
>> the
>> unique card address (the name of which escapes me, but it was akin to 
>> an
>> Ethernet card's MAC) meant that each router had to know where *every 
>> device
>> on every segment* was.  The routing tables went through the roof, 
>> fast.
> 
> I have to admit, I never ran very large IPX networks. My boss built a
> 4/5 floor 300+ station one, with an actual _thick_ Ethernet backbone
> and mirrored servers under Netware 3 SFT. I  was too junior to be
> allowed near that, back then!

I was just earning my spurs back then, but worked at both UPS's IS HQ 
and JP Morgan on Wall St., and both were running Netware over Token 
Ring/IPX.  (As well as SNA/SAA uplinks to the mainframes.)  And at JP 
Morgan, doing remote host lookups was like watching paint dry.

> Oh gods, yes. In fact I am working on a demo DR-DOS VM image right
> now, and fighting such issues all over again. It's kinda fun
> resurrecting knowledge dead and unused for 20+ years, but also a pain
> -- like troubleshooting SCSI bus issues, when I was refurbishing my
> vintage Mac collection for sale before leaving the UK in 2013/2014.

OK.  I loved DR-DOS, but I'm not sure I'm masochistic enough to want to 
fire up a VM to re-experience the pain.  (I say this as someone with a 
Sun, a NeXT, an IMSAI 8080, and two Amigas in my basement.)

> Joking about dancing widdershins under a fool moon while sacrificing a
> _black_ chicken (white only if it's fast wide SCSI-2) ... and if you
> have isolated everything and know that the IRQ, DMA, I/O port, cabling
> and termination is fine, then it's the termination. Once you've fixed
> that, there's only one place to look... it's the termination.

I loved SATA because it let us standardize on laptop HD connectors.  But 
I *really* loved it because SCSI -- which I loved back in the 80's -- 
I'd come to loathe by the mid-90's: 47 different freaking connectors, 
and then terminators were active, passive, or some weird thing in the 
middle.  Just made me shake my head in confusion, and HATE having to try 
to track down the right stuff.