DECnet over VPN.

[Skidilliplop]

Here's one that'll show your age

We have some DECnet kit that needs to communicate over a VPN link. The VPN is between two Cisco 877Ms over ADSL, unfortunately this was set up by a 3rd party that provided the ADSL as a temp measure until the WES10 is installed. thus it's mostly outside of my control to configure.

I'm not 100% but I suspect the VPN is IPSec. I'm fairly sure DECnet cannot be sent over an IPSec VPN.

Hopefully I can just move the Alpha server so that no WAN transit is needed but as a backup if that's not possible I'd like some suggestions on how this could be done. It used to be a 1meg leased line with 2650s each end running bridge groups.

DECnet phase IV/IV+ doesn't use it's own layer2 encap. So I was thinking perhaps I could set up a PPTP/L2TP VPN between two boxes and pipe it over that? Anyone had to do this before? perhaps not with DECnet but maybe with IPX? or appletalk or some other layer3 prot?

I apologise if this makes anyone feel old

 

[sparkey196]

You are going to run into trouble with the 877Ms because they only do IPSEC with no GRE support. I expect you will need to make some kind of Linux endpoints to do the IP encapsulation, perhaps using one of the firewall appliance distros like Smoothwall or Monowall.

 

[dave-lew99]

From a quick look around, it seems you'll need to encapsulate the DECNet traffic into IP using GRE - and as suggested either on the router (if supported) or using a linux based solution. I found this link

http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t433541-decnet-over-ip.html