AsanteTalk Bridge Workaround for Apple II

[Rusty <rdekema@gmail.com>]

Greetings,

In a thread on this group from some time ago, someone was saying that
they had been unable to get their Apple IIGS to work with their
AsanteTalk localtalk-to-ethernet bridge. I have been experimenting
with an AsanteTalk bridge, and I may have found a solution to the
problem this person was experiencing.

Prior to purchasing the AsanteTalk, I had been using my roommate's
GatorBox which "just worked" with the IIGS. Unfortunately, the
GatorBox died, and all I could find was an AsanteTalk box. When I
first hooked it up, it didn't seem to work at all. The Apple IIGS did
not see any file servers on the network.

At the time, I was using netatalk 2.0.3 as the afp server for my
network. Through a process of trial and error, I was able to get my
IIGS to work through the AsanteTalk bridge if and only if I did _both
of_ the following two things on my netatalk server:

-Configured atalkd into "router" mode through the use of the -router
flag in atalkd.conf

-Configured atalkd to advertise a zone name into the AppleTalk network
in atalkd.conf

The name of the Ethernet interface in my atalk machine is "vge0", so
when I was using the gatorbox, I had my configuration line in
atalkd.conf set to simply:

vge0

Now that I am using the AsanteTalk, I've got it set to:

vge0 -router -phase 2 -addr 1.6 -net 1-1 -zone "RustyTel ATalk"

And it works fine. I don't think there is any significance to the
network number "1" or the address "6"; they are just values that I
chose. Of course, you can pick whatever zone name you want as well.

I have a couple ideas as to exactly what is going on and why it only
works with this configuration, but I have not looked into the
situation enough to know for sure. If/when I find out, I will make
another post here in case the info might be of use or interest to
anyone.

Rusty