User:Ibanyan

IBANYAN is actually a network protocol created by a company called FTP (I forget what the letters stood for now) that allowed a computer to encapsulate IP packets inside a VINES-IP packet. VINES-IP was the native protocol that ran Banyan VINES networks. Before the Internet really became popular in 1994 with the large adoption of HTML, IP was a protocol that was almost never used on corporate networks.

Protocols like IPX and VINES-IP were the norm, not IP. In those days (pre-1994) if you wanted to run multiple network protocols on your computer you had a huge issue with memory usage and there were no standards on how it should be done.

Later of course, this changed and some standards emerged on how you could have multiple protocol stacks running on one computer.

Routing IP used to be a nightmare too and protocols like VINES-IP had far superior routing mechanisms in place. Network administrators using VINES-IP almost never had routing issues because it was a kind of "plug-and-play" network protocol. You just plugged clients and servers into the network and VINES-IP figured it all out. Later when Cisco and other companies started selling hardware routers, they too could simply be added to the network without any planning. A truly wonderful network protocol!

So, if you had to use IP to connect to some host, instead of setting up a separate mechanism for dealing with routing IP, you would use IBANYAN. It turned IP into a plug and play network protocol too by doing all the routing in VINES-IP and spitting out the real IP packet at its destination.

There was a slightly different version of this protocol called EBANYAN which worked in the same way but used the Banyan VINES network card drivers instead.

IBANYAN is also the login name that I use in most places around the internet. I use it mainly because I used to be a huge Banyan evangelist (and even worked at Banyan Systems for a while). People who know about Banyan or networking protocols in general will understand the reason for using it, but a non-technical person would see it as "I Banyan therefore I am" :-)

Craig.