Conference 7.286::fddi

netstat -I fta0 -s

    
    re -1 
    
    > netstat -I fta0 -s
    
    I assume this command will give the characteristics of the fddi
    interface. What is the command to disable ring purge ? 
    A customer need to do this and I don't have an fddi interface to
    try on . I want to make sure I give him the correct commands. 
    
    Regards,
    andrew

    
    	I dont think you can disable Ring Purger.
    	Ring Purger Algorithm is pat of FDDI operation, though not part of
    	FDDI standard.All Digital stations on the ring participate in the
    	election of Ring Purger, which cleans NOFs(no owner frame)from the
    	ring transparently, and therefore, helps to improve the robustness
    	and reliability of the FDDI token ring operartion.
    
    						Source:SLD for FDDI.
    
    	Naeem.

        ...you can certainly turn ring purger off - however, in order to do
    it, you need to turn it off on all the devices on the LAN which would
    normally participate in it (which is more or less all the Digital
    devices).  Nowadays, most Digital devices default to ring purger
    disabled, although this varies by interface and firmware revision
    level.
    
        I don't know how to do it in Ultrix, but in general, ring purger is
    disabled via SNMP and the DEC ELAN MIB object eMACRingPurgerEnable (see
    the MIB for details).

	Are snmp agents loaded into our FDDI adaptors ? 
	I can't get a response back for query to object eMACRingPurgerState from
a netview management station to the fddi interface . My guess is that there is
no snmp agaent on the interface card. 

	I thought that I could disable the ring purger from DECnet/OSI because I
could see that "ring purger enable" is a characteristics of fddi station link
entity. However, the fddi station link entity does not support the set directive
.

	The customer has 2 fddi rings , one with DEFTA and a DECswitch on it and
the other has DEFZA and DECswitch on it. The DEFTA has ring purger disabled by 
default, but the DEFZA has ring purger enabled. As a result, from hubwatch, the
customer sees a very high (40%) utilization on the fddi for the ring with the
DEFZA . We want to be able to disable the ring purger so that 1) he can see some
sensible utilization, and 2) releave the fddi driver of the load put on ring
purging. 

	There must be a way for the field to disable ring purger for the 
adaptors that have them turned on by default . Any comments ? 

andrew 

There is no load on the driver or system from ring purging.  It's done entirely
by hardware.

    
    Matt,
    
    Thanks for your reply. through your reply to note 1666 in the DNU_OSI 
    conference , you have actually answered my question for the base note. 
    
    For the reference of others, the way to disable ring purger in Digital 
    Unix system is via the fddi_config utility. 
    
    # fddi_config
    Usage: fddi_config -i[interface] [-option]
            -t[value]  Token Request Time (range from 4 ms to 167.77208 ms)
            -v[value]  Valid Transmit Time (range from 2.35 ms to 5.2224ms)
            -l[value]  Link Error Monitor Threshold (range from 5 to 8)
            -r[value]  Restricted Token Timeout Time (range from 0 to 10000ms)
            -p[1/0]    Enable(1)/Disable(0) Ring Purger State
            -x[1/0]    Enable(1)/Disable(0) Full Duplex Mode ('fta'interface only)
            -c[value]  Counter Update Interval (value >= 0s ; 'fta'interface only)
            -d         Display the settable parameters value
    
    
    
    andrew

    
    Oops, fddi_config is for Digital Unix ! 
    
    Is there an equivalent for Ultrix ?
    
    andrew