[182] in Information Retrieval
Re: Appletalk for sharing DOS CD-ROMs?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John C Klensin)
Fri Jul 9 19:54:06 1993
Date: Fri, 09 Jul 1993 19:53:23 -0400 (EDT)
From: John C Klensin <KLENSIN@INFOODS.MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: <9307092017.AA21926@thin-ice>
To: gyoung@Athena.MIT.EDU
Cc: dospartners@Athena.MIT.EDU, elibdev@Athena.MIT.EDU
X-Envelope-To: dospartners@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, elibdev@ATHENA.MIT.EDU,
>Does anyone have any experience with running Appletalk over ethernet
>with DOS machines out there?
>
>In the Libraries we want to share CD-ROMs over MITNet. There are a
>number of solutions for doing this but they generally use IPX or NetBios
>...
Grant,
This information dates from the first half of 1992, and may therefore
be completely obsolete. However...
At that time, we tried, in conjunction with some consulting work I was
doing, to use Farallon's DOS stuff for fairly simple printing and file
transfer in a network that consisted mostly of Macs. We discovered:
-- it didn't get along with high performance Ethernet cards (e.g., 16
and 32 bit EISA ones)
-- it seemed to have conflicts with some 486 machine BIOSes or timings,
including the one Dell was using in their EISA machines at the time (it
wasn't the only thing with those problems; the high-end Dells are not
favorites of mine)
-- it needed to "own" the Ethernet card, such that no other protocol
stacks could be present. In particular, running Farallon's stuff
implied no TCP/IP using any package we could find. In particular,
it could not co-exist with either packet driver or ODI stacks. And
they provided no way to unload their stack other than rebooting the
machine.
-- their post-sales customer support organization was useless.
Everyone else's
products were to blame, we really didn't need high performance
Ethernet cards, it worked fine in their environment, maybe they
would have new drivers someday....
Unless things have changed a lot out there, make another plan. I would
think, although I haven't looked into it in any depth, that you ought to
be able to configure some version of NFS to run on MSDOS with reasonable
CD-ROM access.
john
