4.2 Ethernet stuff not working

[zemon at felix.UUCP]

We are having a lot of trouble with the 4.2 Ethernet stuff.
If any of you have had troubles like ours, please contact
me.

Our situation:
    We are running 4.2 bsd on two VAXen (a 750 and a 780).
    The VAXen are connected with an Ethernet.  We also have
    a number of M68000 workstations on the same Ethernet
    cable.  The VAXen can communicate both with Berkeley's
    networking software and with a proprietary protocol.
    Both protocols occur on the same wire.  The M68000
    workstations communicate only with our proprietary
    protocol.

Our problem:
    The Berkeley networking stuff is not reliable.
    Connections made with, for instance, rlogin often close
    spontaneously.  MDQS, also running through sockets,
    often loses connections.  The ruptime command, which
    displays the up/down status of the machines, thinks
    that one of the VAXen is down.  Often, ruptime reports
    that the machine you are currently logged in on is the
    one which is down!  This strange condition can only be
    cleared by resetting the interface with /etc/ifconfig
    on the machine which seems to be down.  Our proprietary
    protocol communications are always reliable, even when
    the Berkeley stuff stops working.

These problems make all the "wonderful" networking
capabilities such as rlogin, rdump, etc. virtually useless.

Do we, perhaps, have an early and buggy distribution tape?
Ours is #24, made 8-23-84.  If you are located in southern
California and have a tape made significantly later and
would be willing to let me borrow it, please let me know.

    Art Zemon
    FileNet Corp.
    Costa Mesa, CA
    (714)966-2344
    ...!{decvax, ucbvax}!trwrb!felix!zemon
    ...!bmcg!felix!zemon