Installing and Administering OSI Transport Services

Chapter 2 73

Planning Your Network

Determine the Vendors Involved

Verify that the underlying layers are compatible. The primary

considerations are Session version and functional units, Transport

Layer class, Network Layer protocol and link type. For more detailed

questions about the links used, see “General LAN Questions” and

“General X.25 Questions.”

• What is the interface to this product? Is it standardized? Does it meet

my needs?

The interfaces to the OSI services can be broadly broken into two

categories:

• interactive, where you type commands, or select choices from a

• programmatic, where you develop your own program (typically in

C) using a set of OSI library commands

Support of a standard interface will increase the portability of your

applications and make the transition from one platform to another

simpler.

• What level of conformance or interoperability testing has been

achieved by this product?

Conformance testing indicates that an implementation has

successfully passed a suite of tests against a reference OSI

implementation. Such testing improves the chances that the

implementation is correct and that it will interoperate with other

conformant systems.

Interoperability testing is a direct test between two vendors’

implementations.

• Who will install, conﬁgure and test this product?

If you will not be doing the entire installation yourself, you should

coordinate with the other individuals involved. HP provides a remote

system worksheet that you can use to gather information for these

other systems. See chapter 4.