Abstract

Olicom commissioned Tolly to certify its product for the IBM LAN Network Manager specification. 

This Tolly Group certification report documents the successful IBM LAN Network Manager bridge certification of the Olicom Remote Standalone Bridge OC-3445 version D1.04. Published in September 1994, the report verifies that the bridge interoperated with IBM LAN Network Manager (LLL) version 1.1 and satisfied IBM’s requirements for management compatibility in token-ring networking environments. Olicom USA commissioned The Tolly Group to certify the product as compatible with IBM’s LNM protocol, and the bridge passed testing and received official LNM certification on June 24, 1994. 

The evaluation was designed to validate both functional interoperability and management behavior within IBM’s bridge-management framework. As shown in the bridge test matrices on pages 2 and 3, the certification covered core management and control operations including linking and unlinking the bridge from LAN Network Manager, displaying bridge and segment representations, adapter profile reporting, bridge-number changes, frame-forwarding state changes, single-route broadcast mode control, LAN segment number updates, hop-count limit modifications, password changes, test-segment commands, and adjustments to performance notification intervals and frame-loss thresholds. Additional tests verified station-removal reporting, rejection of incorrect passwords, and the bridge’s response when a second controlling LNM reporting link attempted access. 

The report also validated operational reporting and fault-handling behavior. These tests included soft-error reporting, hard-error beaconing alerts, LAN Reporting Mechanism termination, station-insert reporting, receiver-congestion notification, and multiple soft-error reporting modes such as log all, log limited, and none with counter reset. According to the methodology on page 3, the bridge under test was connected to two 16Mbit/s token rings joined through a 56Kbit/s WAN link. Two LNM stations issued commands and verified frame-, vector-, and subvector-level behavior, while a Network General Expert Sniffer captured traffic. The test bed also used IBM 8228 shielded twisted pair multi-access units and IBM adapter hardware, as illustrated in the page 4 diagram. 

Overall, the report shows that the Olicom OC-3445 delivered the interoperability, management visibility, and event-reporting behavior required for deployment in IBM-managed token-ring remote-bridging environments.