> 5 of them. I have a 3174 with a T/R adapter. Runs 3 SNA printers. > Talks SNA to an OSA-E card (for about a month now). Has been running > for a loooong time.... > (I have a 6th, a spare sitting in the corner)
Lots of people had Ethernet and T/R adapters in 3174s for SNA traffic, but don't confuse these with the 3174 IP gateway feature. There was a RPQ feature for the 3174 that put a minimal IP stack into the 3174 and mapped incoming tn3270 sessions to SNA LUs w/o a TCP stack on the mainframe side. I think one of the US government agencies required them (for some reason they didn't want to buy a Cisco CIP or something normal), so IBM developed it as a PRPQ for certain regions of the world. They were incredibly rare (I've only seen two in 30 years), insanely expensive (about the same price as the 3174 shell itself), and you could have only 1 per physical 3174 box because of the processor resource requirements of the IP stack, which made them really a bad choice for price/performance/floor space. I got mine from someone who was having the same problem Carlos is facing -- when VTAM goes away, the IP gateway feature becomes a very expensive boat anchor. Cost me the price of hauling the 3174 away (which was a good trick in a Geo Metro). Goes along with the AEA and the other strange adapters in my collection of random junk. Come to think of it, 3174s filled with concrete do make very nice boat anchorages. One of the local small towns used about 30 of them to create a retaining wall for the local boat ramp. 8-) -- db
