Hello All HP3000 friends,

Once upon a time, the company I work for was a "wall-to-wall" HP shop.  We
were using HP3000, HP9000, HP PCs, HP DTCs and HP routers to link our sites
together.

Then, we bought a company which was using some of those black boxes
machines (read AS/400).  Some applications require us to use SNA and IBM
terminal controlers on our network.  Now, we have to replace our HP routers
with another brand which supports DLSW protocol.  We had the choice between
IBM and Cisco routers.  We chose Cisco. In places where we also use DTCs,
we found that DTC 16RX performance slows when we install Cisco routers.
Sometimes (in fact very often), display freezes for 3 to 5 seconds on a
terminal linked on a DTC.

Grosso modo, here is the setup:

HP3000 <-> Cisco 3640 <-> 56kb dedicated link <-> Cisco 1005 <-> DTC16RX
<-> 700/92 terminal

Even before configuring that DLSW stuff, we started testing that setup.  As
I just told, we noticed major slowdown on terminals.  On both routers,
configuration is very simple:

...
!
 interface Ethernet0
 description Local Area Network
 ip address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx 255.255.255.0
 bridge-group 1
!
 interface serial0
 description WAN to/from remote site
 ip address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx 255.255.255.0
 bridge-group 1
!
...

 bridge 1 protocol ieee
!

Using a sniffer we discovered that the HP3000 sends one or two frames and
then the DTC sends back a little frame (probably to answer/confirm).  When
using HP routers, the delay (delta) between a HP3000-to-DTC frame and the
DTC-to-HP3000 answer is less than a second.  With Cisco routers, that delta
sometimes increase to 3 or even 5 seconds.

Does any of you have the same problem and what did you do to solve this ?

Thanks in advance.
-
Denis St-Amand ([log in to unmask])
(remove "removeit." from my reply address)