Sihal has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Fellow monks,

This is not a typicak perl question. In fact, it doesn't relate to perl very much.
My problem is that I'll have pretty soon to develop a perl app that communicates with a server over a X25 network.
The trouble is that i have no clue of what X25 is... I'm looking for explanation about how does the hardware work ( what kind of modem? PAD?? cables? etc...) as well on how to make it work with perl ?
I know I'm rather vague, but this is my problem: i dunno nothing about this stuff... Thanks a lot,

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: X25 ?
by mce (Curate) on Oct 11, 2002 at 12:53 UTC
    Hi,

    X25 is a rather old network protocol, and is a digital protocol to communicate over public lines (the phone company), like you would with ISDN or ADSL, although X.25 covers more ISO layers
    There are multiple possible implementations:
    1. Talk direct X.25 protocols with the other side.
    2. Emulate TCP/IP over X.25.

    In the second case, you can just use the perl network libraries to communicate.

    In the iron ages, I used to setup X.25 on IBM/AIX, but I don't remember a lot of this, only that there were many parameters to configure.
    If you really need a deeper insight in the protocol, you should go to a netwerk newsgroup.
    ---------------------------
    Dr. Mark Ceulemans
    Senior Consultant
    IT Masters, Belgium

      Well I don't need all the protocol details right now, I just really need to now how it works phisically. IE: I have a standard PC server, linux on it. It's in a datacenter somewhere. Now, what is needed in order to connect to the X25 network ? I know I have to use a PAD, but do I need to connect to special lines ?? I'm quite in a fog right now . BTW thanks a lot for this reply eventhough it is not perl related.
Re: X25 ?
by derby (Abbot) on Oct 11, 2002 at 13:04 UTC
    It should be fairly transparent to you except when you make your socket connection. Check out this usenix article. The article concerns network connections with perl4 which is pretty old but then again so is X.25. Basically wherever you use AF_INET and PF_INET in your code, you would need to change to AF_X25 and PF_X25. I'm sure other caveats apply.

    As for info on X.25, just google.

    -derby