Re: IIgs netboot idea.

[Steven Hirsch <snhirsch@gmail.com>]

David Schmenk wrote:

> This is exactly the setup I have been trying to get working.  I picked 
> up the AsanteTalk off eBay recently (pretty cheap, too) and I use Debian 
> as my main fileserver.  To the point, I have had zero luck.  I have 
> tried both my IIgs running 6.0.1 and a IIe w/ workstation card.  I've 
> tried hooking up to my Debian server through netatalk and a Mac running 
> OS X.  Neither IIe or IIgs sees the Debian server.  The IIe saw my OS X 
> machine, but I couldn't log on, as I'm sure the OS X machine requires 
> encrypted passwords.  

Having just re-fought the battle to get netatalk up on Ubuntu 6.06LTS, I can 
probably tell you why it's failing.  For whatever reason, debian/ubuntu builds 
netatalk with PAM authentication and passes flags to the configure step that 
prevent SSL libraries from being linked.  This, in turn, prevents netatalk 
from supporting uams_randnum and uams_passwd.  You need randnum for //gs and 
passwd (plain-text) for the workstation card IIRC.

If you are comfortable with building debian packages, find and comment out 
this line in debian/rules and rebuild:

# DEB_CONFIGURE_EXTRA_FLAGS += --without-ssl-dir

The resulting package will now support randnum and plaintext.

Next hurdle is getting the various config files setup:

afpd.conf:

- -uamlist uams_guest.so,uams_clrtxt.so,uams_randnum.so \
       -unixcodepage:ASCII -maccodepage:MAC_ROMAN

Add these lines to AppleVolumes.default:

volcharset:ISO-8859-1
adouble:v1

And, finally, here is an extract from AppleVolumes in my home directory:

/net/home/netatalk/a2e          a2e             casefold:toupper \
        options:prodos adouble:v1 volcharset:ASCII

# Boot volume must have casefold:toupper options:prodos for network
# startup to function properly.
/net/home/A2BOOT                A2BOOT          casefold:toupper \
         options:prodos adouble:v1 volcharset:ASCII

/net/home/netatalk/a2gs         a2gs            adouble:v1 volcharset:ASCII
/net/home/netatalk/macintosh    macintosh       adouble:v1 volcharset:ASCII
/net/home/netatalk/mac_incoming mac_incoming    adouble:v1 volcharset:ASCII
/net/home/netatalk/more_mac     more_mac        adouble:v1 volcharset:ASCII

The 'v1' stuff is probably not required for a new install, but I had data from 
a backlevel version of netatalk and didn't want it to auto-convert to the v2 
volume data format.

Add a stanza to /etc/init.d/netatalk to start a2boot (if you want boot support):

        if [ "$A2BOOT_RUN" = "yes" ]; then
            /usr/sbin/a2boot
            echo -n " a2boot"
        fi

and set

A2BOOT_RUN=yes

in /etc/default/netatalk.

You will need the boot blocks and system images, but these are floating around 
the web if you look for them (contact me privately if you really cannot come 
up with them).  Marsha Jackson has packaged some handy utilities to help you 
get a network-bootable a2 volume built.  Again, should be around.


> Oddly, my IIgs really weirds out while looking for 
> AppleTalk servers through the AsanteTalk.  The mouse cursor  turns to 
> garbage and the machine locks up. Both machines work great talking to 
> AppleShare Server 3.0 and AppleSharePro Server 3.0 running on MacOS 7.5 
> or A/UX 3.0 on a LocalTalk network.
>
> I would love to hear from anyone who has had success with the AsanteTalk 
> and a IIe or IIgs.

For reasons I don't fully understand, there are a number of ethernet/localtalk 
bridging devices that simply won't support Apple 2 networking.  I've had 
success with the Kinetics/Shiva FastPath 4 units at later firmware levels, but 
the FastPath 5 drops sessions after about 5 minutes.  The little Asante bridge 
units (I have several) simply don't work at all.  The Cayman Gatorbox seems to 
be far and away the best bet (I am currently using one that came to me through 
the kindness of Marsha Jackson - thanks again if you're lurking!)

Steve