WORKSTATION TO INTERNET - PROBLEMS, SOLUTIONS, AND CHALLENGES

As national and international research and education networks plan to offer services to a broader community of scholars, links to workstation LANs become essential. The diversity in workstations and LANs requires use of several integration tools in concert to achieve reasonable levels of transparent, high performance service of internetworking protocols. This paper presents solutions for connecting workstations to research and education networks. Both university developed (public domain) and commercially available solutions are discussed to assist organizations in selecting an economically and technically feasible mix of tools and services. A popular integration solution supports multiple protocols in the workstation. As campus networks evolve beyond flat Ethernets connected to the Ethernet router. on-campus routing and/or bridging becomes an important consideration. Gateways also extend higher level internetwork services to workstations, but do not sacrifice scarce workstation memory. Standard LAN protocols connect the workstation to a gateway server that translates the requests into appropriate calls for internetwork services. These gateways may be installed internal to a PC based file server or may reside on a mini computer. Typically these products offer support for terminal emulation, file transfer and X.400 and/or SMTP main. These products offer some management advantages when dealing with large numbers of casual internet users. New technology solutions include multiple protocol support in in servers, protocol encapsulation (or tunneling), support for concurrent file services, remote procedure call (RPCs), and layer specific gateways.