Tristan Mumford wrote:
G'day! In the last couple of days a couple of random discoveries made me dream something up. I wanted to run it by everyone here. Recently I discovered a product called the AsanteTalk Ethernet bridge. It seems to be a fairly venerable product that acts as a bridge between AppleTalk and Ethernet. It still however uses AppleTalk. Also in the last couple of days I did a basic fileserver install of Debian on a small IDE harddrive to aid in the recovery and copying of some of my old files. It installed the AppleTalk daemon which actually surprised me a little. I didn't realise it was a core part of the file server install. But then I've never done a canned install before.
This is exactly the setup I have been trying to get working. I picked up the AsanteTalk off eBay recently (pretty cheap, too) and I use Debian as my main fileserver. To the point, I have had zero luck. I have tried both my IIgs running 6.0.1 and a IIe w/ workstation card. I've tried hooking up to my Debian server through netatalk and a Mac running OS X. Neither IIe or IIgs sees the Debian server. The IIe saw my OS X machine, but I couldn't log on, as I'm sure the OS X machine requires encrypted passwords. Oddly, my IIgs really weirds out while looking for AppleTalk servers through the AsanteTalk. The mouse cursor turns to garbage and the machine locks up. Both machines work great talking to AppleShare Server 3.0 and AppleSharePro Server 3.0 running on MacOS 7.5 or A/UX 3.0 on a LocalTalk network.
I would love to hear from anyone who has had success with the AsanteTalk and a IIe or IIgs.
Anyway after a while the two items sort of connected in my mind. I started to think it may be possible to make an HFS image and set it up as a loopback device, or even a small hfs formatted harddrive to plop the necessary bootfiles for the IIgs on. The only reason I was thiking HFS is for the preservation of resource forks. Unfortunately I don't know of a ProDOS fs driver for linux, however incredibly useful it would be. If these steps and ideas actually worked then some more interesting hacks would be possible, like an altered userland driver specifically for this purpose allowing disk images to be entered like directories. Imagine how useful that would be :) I would like to try all this out myself, however I'm having the standard problem. Every one of the bridges I have found are in the US, and at a premium price too. So if there's anyone across the ocean that wants to give this a try or has already done so I'd love to hear about it. Tristan.
Good luck. Let me know if there is something you want me to try. Dave...