Re: Best Way to Serve My II's

[CUTjefbla@bconnex.net (Jeff Blakeney)]

On Mon, 12 Feb 2001 04:47:13 -0500, What Up <whataboutit@fwi.com>
wrote:

>Cool, I'm thinking about getting four more Apple IIgs to compliment the
>one I have right now, and trying to use them educational kiosks. My
>question is what is the best way to network them. Do I have to use
>Localtalk to network them together and user printers (and use the funny
>little box thingies), or is there a cheap place to get ethernet cards
>for them.  Then can I do a diskless boot with them.  Do I have to use
>GNO (I see that not many people are using it), or is there a better
>way?  As for my server, will Macintosh IIsi be sufficent for them, or
>should I tie up my 7100. I wanted to go ethernet, because my Mac has an
>ethernet.

The easiest way to network them is using the AppleTalk protocol over a
LocalTalk connection.  The Mac IIsi should be sufficient as a server
for this.

You can boot the IIgs' with AppleTalk if you have AppleShare v3.x but
if there is a power outage that takes out all the machines including
the machine that the AppleShare server is running on, then the IIgs'
won't reboot as they will time out trying to connect to the server
while it is rebooting.  However, you could always use a single floppy
drive on each IIgs that would boot into ProDOS 8 and simply wait for a
certain amout of time before doing a PR# command to boot the AppleTalk
slot.

However, depending on what operating system you are going to use and
the size of the program you are running, you may be able to get away
with just a 3.5" floppy drive as your boot drive on each of the IIgs'
and have then just get data from the AppleShare server.

Ethernet isn't really a viable option at this point in time because
there is no file sharing software available for the IIgs that can take
advantage of the LANceGS card.

 Jeff Blakeney - Dean of the Apple II Unversity on A2Central.com