Thanks for all the helpful souls who responded. My original question dealt with connecting Suns up to IBM mainframes using SNA. Most people reasonably assumed that I wanted to run a 3270 terminal or printer emulator on the Sun. In fact, that was not the case. We are doing that right now using SunLink (SunLink, of course, is a Sun product) and haven't experienced any problems over about two years usage. Another company worth investigating would be Morning Star at (800)558-7827; I haven't used their products personally but they were very helpful in steering me to the right product. So, basically, this approach will let your Sun emulate IBM terminals or printers in various fancy fashions.
What I really wanted to do was something called "IP tunneling." That is, I want a connection that looks like this: Sun --> IBM --> IBM --> Sun where the IBM part is as invisible as possible. Why would any pseudo-sane person wish to do such a thing? ( A lot of vendors asked this, too). Well, the IBMs manage a Wide Area Net that's already in place. So instead of buying new more expensive comm lines we want to use the old, existing phone lines. Anyway, it turns out that Sun has a product called LU 6.2 / APPC that gives an application programming interface that might work. Even better is Brixton Systems (617)497-2938. They supposedly have VME and Sbus cards that plug into the Sun. From there you run a wire to an IBM 3725 or 3745 communications front end. The Brixton card and software "automagically" wrap your loveable IP packets into SNA-speak, route them to the right 3745 on the other end. That then goes back into a wire to another one of these cards that decodes the !
whole shebang back to TCP/IP on t
So many people sent helpful replies that I cannot list them here, although I did try to respond personally to them. Thanks again to the friendly folks on sun-magers.
Randy Garrett
rlg@ida.org
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