Re: AppleTalk

[salfter@salfter.dyndns.org (Scott Alfter)]

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In article <MqjSa.32191$EZ2.7642@nwrddc01.gnilink.net>,
Michael Pender <mpender@hotmail.com> wrote:
>I'm looking for a convenient and relatively transparent way to use Appletalk
>to share the resources (such as excessively large disk space) of my existing
>machines, and I have a few questions for people who have gotten it to work:
>
>Can I boot the IIgs from Appletalk?  If so, what are the limitations?

IIRC, some versions of AppleShare (the file/print-server software that runs
on older Macs) supported booting of Apple II clients.  I think there has
also been some work at getting netatalk to enable Apple II net-booting. 
I've not tried either approach myself, though, so I can't speak from
experience.

>Does AppleTalk work under Prodos 8, or only under the Finder?  In other
>words, under Prodos 8 can I browse the hard drive a my Mac or PC looking for
>files?

You'll need to boot into GS/OS, but ProDOS 8 apps will have access to
network shares.  Note that any shared files/directories need to be named in
accordance with ProDOS conventions in order to be accessible: no more than
15 characters, starts with an uppercase letter, and uses only uppercase
letters, numbers, and dot.

>Is there a convenient way to store DSK files on the second computer (Mac or
>PC) and use these as though they were local floppies?

Not that I've heard...file servers are designed to serve up files, not disk
images.  You can extract the files from the image and put them on the
server.  (That won't help much with DOS 3.3 stuff...but DOS 3.3 doesn't do
networking at all.)

>Can a person transfer a file via AppleTalk to the slot 5 ramdisk and use
>that like a floppy?

You could...don't know what point there would be, other than to pull the
files from the network once and run from the RAMdisk after that.  (Come to
think of it, that'd be much faster, so as long as any changes made to the
RAMdisk get sent back to the server before you shut off (or if you make no
changes you want to keep), this might let you get better performance from a
diskless system.)

>How does the speed of AppleTalk compare to a 3.5" floppy, an IDE slot drive,
>or an external SCSI drive?

At 230.4 kbps, it'll be much slower than a local hard drive (IDE or
SCSI...either could theoretically deliver 8 Mbps).  I've not compared the
speed to a floppy drive, but if I had to guess, the network connection would
be at least equal in speed...possibly a bit faster, as I think floppy drives
are good for roughly 60-100 kbps.  (There's likely some overhead in the
network-communication protocols that drops your throughput a bit from the
maximum.)

  _/_   Scott Alfter
 / v \  salfter@salfter.dyndns.org
(IIGS(  http://alfter.us            Top-posting!
 \_^_/  pkill -9 /bin/laden         >What is the most annoying thing on Usenet?

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