Bridging DECNET

[abbas.ali]

How to bridge Decnet w/o hurting an IP traffic.

I have a mainframe in datacenter. The branch has one Decnet Server and a Decnet client. The decnet server needs connectivity to the main frame through bridging.

r1 (Data Center) connected to r2 in branch office. r2 is then connected to 6509 switch router. The 6509 is also doing VLAN Routing. In one of the VLANs I have this decnet server/client. I only like to bridge DECNET protocol all the way to the data center.

If I configure "bridge 1 protocol dec" on 6509, r2 and r1 and assign only WAN Links ports to brige group1.

Will it work without hurting IP traffic? I just don't want IP traffic to be bridged.

Please Help ASAP,

Thanks,

[bbranch]

The “bridge 1 protocol dec” command is only enabling the DEC compliant spanning tree (as against the IEEE spanning tree) not the bridging of DEC. Also you would need to enable bridging on your LAN interfaces as well as the WAN to get traffic between the sites.

By default if you configure bridging on an interface you will bridge all protocols that are not routed, as long as you have enabled IP Routing on your router, IP will not be bridged (unless you are running CRB or IRB). To restrict your bridging to only DEC you need to use a bridge filter, this can be configured to permit the DEC protocol types and deny all other bridged traffic.

As an alternative, if you are running DECNET Phase IV or Phase V (not LAT) you could always route DECNET instead of bridging it.