leeke@cascade.STANFORD.EDU (Steven D. Leeke) (09/15/86)
Does anyone have any experiences with MacServe they would like to
share?
For example:
1) Will it run with an Apple HD20? A Paradise Mac 10?
2) What kind of hard disk partitioning is required/available.
3) What boot-up software is required?
4) What kind of speed degredation am I looking at?
5) Are there any/many applications that get confused with MacServe?
6) Does it run well with other AppleTalk devices (IWII, Laser)?
7) How much memory is eaten up in overhead?
8) What does it do to my System/Finder?
9) General comments? Praises? Horror stories?
Thanks,
Steve Leeke
--
Steven D. Leeke, Center for Integrated Systems, Stanford University
{ucbvax,decvax}!decwrl!glacier!leeke, leeke@cascade.stanford.edu
Disclaimer: I disclaim any knowledge of the above message and its contents.cole@sas.UUCP (Tom Cole) (09/24/86)
Here are some thoughts on Macserve. I should state up front that I purchased
Macserve and kept it for about a week, before returning it to my dealer for a
refund (nice dealer, eh?). My reasons are outlined below. Usual disclaimer
follows:
I am not connected with the authors of Macserve or any other Macintosh software
operation.
Now, about Macserve. I basically liked the idea very much, but learned the
following things:
1. It is a DISK server, not a file server. What this really means may not be
immediately apparant. You can open a disk volume on another node, and play
in it to your hearts contents. However, it is a "private" volume, and
can't be accessed in any way by another user. You can access (mount) the
volume as shared, but it is read-only for every user. This means you can't
have a volume that contains such standards as MacPaint or MacWrite because
they insist on opening scratch files on the volume they were launched from.
Therefore, only one user can play with these toys at one time.
2. If you have one or more Macs and want to give them more space than is
available from floppies, you CAN make use of Macserve. Partition the
disk into volumes for each Mac-Station, and mount each one as a private
work area. You can place a system folder in each one and run as "diskless"
Macs.
3. Partitioning is semi-flexible. You can set it to any multiple of 1k with
100k as the minimum. When a volume is created you specify its size, and
it is set forever (or until you delete the volume, whichever comes first).
You can have up to 16 Macserve volumes on a single server. The Macserve
folks recommend NOT using the partioning (if any) of your native hard
disk and instead use the Macserve pseudo volumes. I personally don't
agree - the overhead of letting Macserve stand between you and your
beloved hard disk was too intrusive for volumes I didn't want to share.
4. Personal note: whenever you access a Macserve volume, a cute little MS
appears in the upper left corner next to the apple menu. At first, I
though "neat, I know when I am using the network as opposed to local
disks." However, a) I don't really care, and b) it turns out that being
reminded of how often I use the network is discouraging when disk speed
is important.
5. Speaking of speed, Macserve is semi-fast. It runs faster than the old
(400k) floppies, and seems slightly faster than the new (800k) floppies.
However, if you have been using a Hyperdrive for a year, and then try
to use a Macserve workstation mac, the difference is depressing. I
wasn't really suprised that I noticed this, just surprised that it made
such a difference.
6. I ran Macserve on a 512e with 10mb Hyperdrive, and used a plain 512k
as the workstation. The Macserve document says you can run 2-16 user
nodes off of your hard disk server Mac, and still use the server Mac
for real things too. Well, sort of. In practice, I found that one
user made enough of a dent in performance that it made a measurable
dent in productivity for the user of the server mac. I also find that
since it is so appletalk intensive, you don't get cursor updates on the
screen often enough when there is lots of traffic. The consequence for
users who have been using a Mac for a year or so is that you expect the
mouse to end up where you wanted after moving it on the ole mouse pad.
When it doesn't get there, you over-correct before clicking, and tend to
queue up mouse-downs where you don't want them. Bad news for the
impatient user.
7. The whole reason why I bought Macserve was because I didn't want to
spring for a second hard disk for my second Mac (both doing program
development in Pascal and C). If this is your situation, I don't
recommend using it - too slow. I ended up picking up a second hard
disk anyway, and it solved my problems. However, I could see an
environment where many users are doing less disk-intensive work where
it would work very well. A local copy shop that also does Mac publishing
(remains nameless, but rhymes with Blinko) is considering using it for
thier public-use Macs, and seems to work really well.
8. Macserve didn't intrude in the least on Appletalk, which was nice. I
tested it with a lazerwriter, and an ImageWriter II and had no trouble.
I also played with an ImageWriter as a spooled printer. Macserve does
have a nice printer queue gimmick, which queues up jobs from any node
and prints them later. Includes a banner page you can modify for your
own ends with ResEdit. It also lets you defer "large" jobs for later
printing, and print "small" jobs immediately. For my purposes, Hyperdrive
makes a very nice spooler I would rather use. Note that Macserve doesn't
spool appletalk printers, only a direct-connect imagewriter.
9. A VERY nice feature of Macserve that deserves mention is that the volume
mount facility is a deskaccessory, and is very complete. This is one of
the best volume accessing implementations I have seen for ease of use and
ever-present availability. Beats the old Corvus "Volume Mgr" all out.
10. Because I was using 512k systems, memory was a bit of a concern. The
Macserve system takes over a non-trivial amount of the system heap, plush
the alternate screen buffer. I ended up with a little over 300K of
space to call my own, with minimal Macserve caching and no "control panel"
caching at all. Note that Macserve has its own cache. It is a write-
through cache so it's not a dangerous as some, but of course you've got
to have the memory to spare...
11. No HFS backup. This is a bummer after dropping the $250 for the system.
You've got to copy the volume to a MFS volume and then you can use the
built-in "archive" utility. Sounds like a job for a third-party backup
to me...
Conclusions:
It really IS a nice product, but not for what I wanted. As you may surmise,
I am hung up on speed. This probably is because I got a Hyperdrive a fairly
long time ago, and am very used to short code/compile/link/debug turnaround.
However, for an office environment (which I am sure is the target market
anyway) it would probably be pretty neat.
End of comments. Asbestos is bad for my lungs, so please avoid the Irwin
Allen approach to flames.
Tom Cole
SAS Institute
PO Box 8000
Cary NC 27510
"I now know the difference between code and magic. Magic has no comments."
FW Hester