Is Cisco's DLSw+ compatible with other vendors' DLSw?

[bocarrier]

Need to know if I can communicate with other vendors' DLSw. Are there any caveats I need to know about? Are there any special configs that need to be entered?

[demiller]

Although there are vendors who support Dlsw. They do not have the same supported features. Cisco's Dlsw+ has a more robust feature set, but it will work with a basic Dlsw configuration.

[dixho]

There are 3 RFCs related to DLSw:

RFC 1434

RFC 1795

RFC 2166

RFC 1795 and RFC2166 are backward compatible; while RFC 1434 are not backward compatible with RFC 1795 and 2166. Cisco routers support RFC 1795 and 2166.

Nortel (Bay?) supports RFC 1434 and 1795. If you want to connect Cisco routers and Nortel routers, make sure that you configure RFC1795 on the Nortel routers.

IBM 2216 supports RFC 1795 and RFC 2216. However, IBM 2216 uses multicast and TCP to contact remote DLSw peer. Using multicast for DLSw peer connection is not common on DLSw implementations on Cisco routers. I suggest you to configure TCP on IBM 2216.

Other than Cisco routers, Nortel and IBM are the most commonly used routers for DLSw. One final comment, any routers/DLSw switches that are RFC 1795 compatible should connect to Cisco routers without any problem.