Re: IIgs GS/OS AppleTalk question - volume size

[Phil Beesley <pb14@le.ac.uk>]

In article <1fadbxl.1hvukk71bd23eoN%dempson@actrix.gen.nz>, David
Empson <dempson@actrix.gen.nz> wrote:

> Blake Patterson <blake@blakespot.com> wrote:
> 
> > I have a ROM 3 IIgs w/ the latest version of GS/OS.  I established a
> > LocalTalk link to my G4 Mac (using a Stealth Serial Port, an oldschool
> > serial addon).  I can browse my G4's massive drives with ease.
> > 
> > I tried to get this going on my Mac Plus w/ System 6.0.5 and found
> > that on any but my smallest (2GB) partition, the Mac Plus will bomb on
> > selection of that drive.
> > 
> > I found ... that there is a 2GB limit on most AppleShare protocols.  Why
> > can the IIgs deal it this easily while the Mac fail??  I suppose GS/OS is
> > more recent than System 6.0.5??
> 
> Yes.  The final IIgs system release (6.0.1) was in 1992 (or was it
> '93?).  System 7 for the Mac came out in 1990, so 6.0.5 would have been
> 1989 or 1990

Mac System 6 ships with version 2.0.x of the AppleShare client
software. The GS/OS system is more up to date than this but there are
some extra bugs (eg the case sensitivity problem when reading which
UAMs are supported by an AppleShare server which has been corrected by
Marsha).

As David said in a bit I've trimmed, Mac System 6 is unable to report
free space on a server volume correctly if it exceeds 2Gb; for System 6
and early versions of System 7, the free space figure may be reported
as a negative number...

I observed a slightly different problem with Mac System 7.5.5 this
morning. The free space figure is always reported as "1.9Gb" if it
exceeds 2Gb.

> System 7.5.3 on a PCI PowerMac will support local volume sizes up to 2
> TB.  I'm not sure what limit applied in earlier versions and on earlier
> machines, but it might have been as low as 4 GB or even 2 GB.

The local volume size is limited to 2Gb for early versions of MacOS. As
with the GS volume size, this can be addressed by creating multiple
partitions on a disk.
 
> It wouldn't surprise me if System 6 on the Mac is limited to supporting
> volume sizes of 2 GB, so it dies a horrible death if any volume is
> larger than that.  The Mac traditionally treated all numbers as signed
> integers, so a volume size between 2 and 4 GB may appear to be a
> negative number.  Larger values may have been truncated to 32 bits.

I've never had a problem accessing large AppleShare volumes containing
3Gb or more free space with Mac System 6. Is it possible that the
problem is related to the number of files in the shared folder? This is
easy enough for Blake Patterson to test -- create a new shared volume
on the same disk as the existing large share. The two shared volumes
will always have the same free space as they are on the same physical
disk.

Phil