Subject: RE: DLSw Discovery

From: David Bryant/HQ/3Com <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 Sep 96 10:50:52 EDT

Stephane - 

There are two ways in which the existing DLSw Mcast specification addresses 
your concern of DLSw discovery.

Firstly, the paper as written uses a combination of Mac/NetBIOS discovery over 
multicast and dynamic peer on demand connections.  This technique does not 
discover all DLSws and then bring up TCP connections.  Instead, it discovers 
the location of desired endstation partners, and only establishes TCP 
connections where necessary.   This scheme was thought to be a superior 
scalability enhancements as it avoids unnecessary TCP connections.  

Secondly, the vendor specific section of the document allows vendors to define 
a specific 'discovery packet' and protocol to be used in discovering other 
DLSws for the purpose of TCP connection establishment.   For the purposes of 
interoperability, a vendor could define such a mechanism and bring it to the 
AIW for adoption as a standard.  Since Proteon and IBM already do something of 
this nature, perhaps they could volunteer such a standard.

Cheers, Dave