I read this a year or so ago. The book makes some good points, but the poor writing makes the book a struggle to get through (and I wouldn't consider the good points presented worth it). You'd be much better off reading Debugging the Development Process and learning more about how your bosses are looking at you.
I just wanted to correct a few misconceptions in the previous posting.
Disclaimer: I work on IBM Edge Server.
First, the people you'll talk to if you have a problem with Edge Server are full-time career professionals, who specialize in Edge Server and work directly with the developers to get your problem solved. Because the support team work with customer problems every day, I suspect they're more knowledgeable than the developers on the issues that most often affect users. Of course, the developers get directly involved if the problem is tough.
If you don't need a paid level of support, there are newsgroups on news.software.ibm.com where you can post questions and often get a response from other users or directly from a developer.
Bridging between ethernet and Token-Ring is really not a good option. It's basically a kludge. IBM sells (sold?) a box that claimed to do it, but even IBM, who invented Token-Ring, couldn't get the thing to work all that well. We tried using one once, but gave up on it.
So, as others have said, stick to routing, TCP/IP, and proxy ARP if at all possible.
True, SNA is still being used a lot more than many people probably suspect. There are many banks, insurance companies, and other generally conservative institutions with large investments in SNA networks that they aren't going to just throw away. They continue investing, too: adding new equipment, upgrading software, and so forth, so it would make sense that some of that new equipment could be running Linux.
On the other hand, it seems unlikely that many people are setting up new SNA networks, and it's getting harder and harder to find people who know how to run one, which over time will make running SNA expensive or impossible. It'll be a long time before all SNA is dead, but the handwriting is on the wall.
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I read this a year or so ago. The book makes some good points, but the poor writing makes the book a struggle to get through (and I wouldn't consider the good points presented worth it). You'd be much better off reading Debugging the Development Process and learning more about how your bosses are looking at you.
I just wanted to correct a few misconceptions in the previous posting.
Disclaimer: I work on IBM Edge Server.
First, the people you'll talk to if you have a problem with Edge Server are full-time career professionals, who specialize in Edge Server and work directly with the developers to get your problem solved. Because the support team work with customer problems every day, I suspect they're more knowledgeable than the developers on the issues that most often affect users. Of course, the developers get directly involved if the problem is tough.
If you don't need a paid level of support, there are newsgroups on news.software.ibm.com where you can post questions and often get a response from other users or directly from a developer.
And before doing anything else, go to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers web site and check out all their information, especially "Writers Beware".
So set one up.
Bridging between ethernet and Token-Ring is really not a good option. It's basically a kludge. IBM sells (sold?) a box that claimed to do it, but even IBM, who invented Token-Ring, couldn't get the thing to work all that well. We tried using one once, but gave up on it.
So, as others have said, stick to routing, TCP/IP, and proxy ARP if at all possible.
True, SNA is still being used a lot more than many people probably suspect. There are many banks, insurance companies, and other generally conservative institutions with large investments in SNA networks that they aren't going to just throw away. They continue investing, too: adding new equipment, upgrading software, and so forth, so it would make sense that some of that new equipment could be running Linux.
On the other hand, it seems unlikely that many people are setting up new SNA networks, and it's getting harder and harder to find people who know how to run one, which over time will make running SNA expensive or impossible. It'll be a long time before all SNA is dead, but the handwriting is on the wall.
Very nice, except: I set my preference to flattened mode but I still get threaded mode in Ask Slashdot.