SIP/IPAE Interoperability Testing Event Summary

[Dave Crocker <[e-mail]>]

The troops assembled, yesterday, at SGI to conduct the first
SIP/IPAE group testing grope.  Folks from Sun, Network General, TGV,
and SGI appeared in person.  Folks from Beame & Whiteside and
Intercon attended over the net.  Code was bashed.  Bits were
sent.  Much progress was made by all.

The very superficial summary of results is that Sun, Beame &
Whiteside, and Intercon have essentially complete versions of
SIP/IPAE.  Network General, Sun and SGI all have their network
monitoring products able to track and report on SIP and IPAE
packets.

TGV, Sun's effort on KA9Q, and SGI also made good progress.  There
will probably be substantial additional progress to report by
the demo on Tuesday.

A very significant symbolic milestone was achieved rather
casually in the afternoon.  Carl Beame discovered a bug in
his code.  (No, this was not the signficant event.)  He sent
an update file to my email account, but I had some trouble
retrieving it.  I suggested he send it directly to one of the
other guys.  A bit later, he called to say that he had decided
to FTP it to the Sun Server.  (Sun has had a machine available
for testing for some time.)  I thought we would not have any
trouble bringing the file from the Sun server over to the SGI
lab, but he patiently explained that he had put the file on
the Sun machine that was in the SGI lab... and had done all this
using IPAE.

Achievement:  IPAE has now been used a) to send important data, and
b) over the Internet with no involvement of any network operations
staff.

Dave