Re: 20 Years Later: What storage options for IIgs?

["Hugh Hood" <hugh.hood@a2central.com.remove-nxq-this>]

  To: Steven Hirsch
Steve,

I'm really enjoying your detailed input on this subject of modern mass
storage options including networking for file sharing/storage.

I've been going down this road myself lately after finally upgrading the
office Macs from OS 9 to OS X 10.4, which co-exist with some IIGS AppleWorks
5.1 monster machines.

Under OS 9, we did some basic file transferring between a IIGS and a Mac
using sneakernet, with ProDOS formatted Zip Disks and floppies. Pretty
simple. Pretty fast.

(BTW, if you do retire your aging SCSI hard drives try a couple of SCSI Zip
100s per machine. When they're connected to a RamFAST, they're great. Fast
and portable. I partition them into (3) 31 Meg partitions with Hard Disk
Speed Tools on the Mac, rather than using the IIGS. Both machines, Mac and
IIGS, read them fine. With (2) drives per machine, backups are pretty easy.)

Unfortunately, the OS X Finder won't mount a ProDOS formatted disk. {I just
_know_ Steve Jobs had a hand in this. <g>}

If you want to go to the trouble to write your file to a HFS formatted disk
first, it will work, but that adds yet another step.

I have been hoping some Apple II code type would look at MacFUSE for OS X,
and write a ProDOS file system mounter, but I have yet to see it, and I
digress. <http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/>

Anyway, I decided to try the networking route, using the Cayman GatorBox CS.
You, and others, have mentioned success with this method. I really didn't
want to have to boot GS/OS 6.0.1 (for AppleTalk file sharing) just for
ProDOS 8 based AppleWorks, but if that's what it took to network the IIGS's
to the Macs, I'd do it, and it would be more convenient than sneakernet, to
be sure. With a RamFAST and plenty of RAM, booting into a bare bones GS/OS
first is really no big deal anyway.

Now for the rub that shot me down. I ran across these docs on the Apple
site.

<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106461>

"Mac OS X 10.4 and later don't support Personal File Sharing (or other AFP)
over AppleTalk,"

The article goes on to say that AFP over AppleTalk _will_ work for OS X 10.1
through 10.3, but not for 10.0 to 10.0.4.

So, even with the GatorBox CS, the IIGS won't file share with a Mac running
OS X 10.4 or later. Yuck!

What to do? Well, until someone adds some ProDOS disk mounting capabilities
to the OS X Finder, (MacFUSE, maybe), I'm thinking of buying a couple of
Uthernet Cards, enabling FTP file sharing on the Macs, and using Ewen
Wannop's SAFE to FTP files when I need to. Or, if I've got to boot GS/OS
anyway, I just re-write the files to be transferred to a HFS formatted disk
and forget about the networking.

I'll give a heartfelt 'attaboy' to anyone who can suggest a simple and easy
solution to this problem.

Hugh...


> From: "Steven Hirsch" <snhirsch@gmail.com>
> Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
> Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2007 11:55:31 -0500
> To: comp.sys.apple2
> Subject: Re: 20 Years Later: What storage options for IIgs?
> 
> altan@aol.com wrote:
> 
>> What sort of mass
>> storage options exist?
> 
> Most would suggest a CF card solution such as CFFA.  Even die-hards like
> myself are mothballing their (rapidly aging) SCSI drives.
> 
>> - I see some Ethernet products exist, but is there any way to NFS-like
>> mount disks?
> 
> Not directly over ethernet.  However if you have a Linux box (or Mac OSX)
> available, you can setup an appletalk server and directly mount volumes from
> there. Bridging localtalk <--> ethernet can be done using a Cayman Gatorbox
> (plentiful on eBay) or even an older Mac running bridge software.
> 
> AFAIK, no one has tried writing a //gs appletalk driver that goes out over
> ethernet.  Since most of the logic lives in the system ROM, this might not be
> very simple to do.
> 
> It might be easier to write an NFS client than to do appletalk over, e.g. an
> Uthernet adapter.  The high-level API to NFS is vaguely similar to ProDOS, in
> that it uses basic open-by-name, access relative block, read, write, etc.
> primitives.  The hard work would be in supporting resource forks.
> 
> Classic NFS operates over UDP, which is certainly easier to implement than
> TCP.  Still, you have to manage packet re-ordering, fragmentation and all the
> other "usual suspects".
> 
> Steve
> 
> 
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