mbrookov@udenva.cair.du.edu (Matthew B. Brookover) (07/13/89)
Hi, We are in the process of purchasing 20 Macintosh SE's for a lab at the University of Denver. We would like to network them to get the following services: File service: programs such as MacWrite, Excel, type fonts, MacDraw, and a few public domain programs need to be available to each work station The students will keep their files on their own floppy disk. Printer sharing: we would like to share both Imagewriters and a Laserwriter //nt. It would also be nice to have the server keep track of how many pages are printed for charging purposes. Telnet and ftp: we would like to be able to telnet and ftp to several BSD 4.3 Unix and VMS hosts in a central computing facility. The VMS hosts are running Multinet TCP/IP. Questions: We currently have a lab of MS-DOS machines with a Novell file server, we have heard about Novell's Macintosh support. How well does it work? Am I required to have Novell's NE/2 Appletalk card in the server or are there any other options? The Novell file server is a PS/2 model 80, and it is running Netware 2.15. We do have a Vax 11/750 and an IBM RT running BSD 4.3 Unix that could be used as an NFS server. What NFS client products are available for the Mac? do they require ethernet or will the run on localtalk? To do the TCP/IP stuff we would need the Kinetics fastpath or the Gatorbox. Are their any other less expensive products that will move localtalk packets to ethernet? Has anybody used NCSA telnet? How well does it work? what other telnet/ftp programs are out there? Localtalk is supposed to be very slow, will it provide good performance to 20 workstations, 1 file server and a TCP/IP gateway? On MS-DOS, the network card can only be used by one application (Novell, telnet, etc) at a time unless you have something like FTP's packet driver. Will the Mac allow a workstation to run telnet and read/write to a disk mounted from a file server at the same time? How good is AppleShare? will it provide good performance for 20 workstations on Localtalk? The ethernet cards for the Mac are very expensive, and I am not sure we can afford 20 of them. Is localtalk fast enough to provide reasonable performance? I would also like to hear some peoples experiences with Macintosh labs. How do you deal with viruses? How is you Mac lab set up? How many Macs on a segment of localtalk cable? what file server do you use and what do you think of it? If any body is interested I will provide a summary of the answers I get. Thanks Matt Brookover Computing and Information Resources University of Denver internet: mbrookov@nike.cair.du.edu [130.253.1.14] uucp: ncar!dunike!mbrookov
edmoy@violet.berkeley.edu (07/14/89)
In article <12020@udenva.cair.du.edu> mbrookov@udenva.cair.du.edu (Matthew B. Brookover) writes: > >Hi, We are in the process of purchasing 20 Macintosh SE's for a lab at >the University of Denver. We would like to network them to get the >following services: > > File service: programs such as MacWrite, Excel, > type fonts, MacDraw, and a few public domain > programs need to be available to each work station > The students will keep their files on their own > floppy disk. > > Printer sharing: we would like to share both > Imagewriters and a Laserwriter //nt. It would > also be nice to have the server keep track of how > many pages are printed for charging purposes. > > Telnet and ftp: we would like to be able to telnet > and ftp to several BSD 4.3 Unix and VMS hosts in a > central computing facility. The VMS hosts are running > Multinet TCP/IP. > >Questions: . . . >We do have a Vax 11/750 and an IBM RT running BSD 4.3 Unix that could be >used as an NFS server. What NFS client products are available for the >Mac? do they require ethernet or will the run on localtalk? > >To do the TCP/IP stuff we would need the Kinetics fastpath or the >Gatorbox. Are their any other less expensive products that will move >localtalk packets to ethernet? Here at Berkeley, we use FastPaths, since we have a volume discount deal with Kinetics. Then we use the Columbia AppleTalk Package (CAP), which is a set of public domain software for Unix that provides file serving and print spooling. It available from anonymous ftp from sumex-aim.stanford.edu (in the info-mac/unix) directory, or from cunixc.cc.columbia.edu, in the pub directory (somewhere). Having the source code on Unix allows us to add new features to CAP, such as some simple access restrictions to file servers and print spoolers. We are investigating adding Kerberos authentication to the CAP stuff, but this will be way in the future. All in all, this system has worked very well for us. > >Has anybody used NCSA telnet? How well does it work? what other >telnet/ftp programs are out there? NCSA is the best PD telnet around. The version 2.2 is stable, and 2.3, which will support MacTCP, as well as their own TCP libraries, is in beta, and should be out pretty soon. Stanford has their own package, call MacIP, which has a nice ftp user interface, but I like the telnet from NCSA. > >Localtalk is supposed to be very slow, will it provide good performance >to 20 workstations, 1 file server and a TCP/IP gateway? Performance is about the speed of a floppy disk. Not great, but for people who haven't used computers before, I thing it will be quite adequate, for typical things, like copying files and running most applications. However, if all twenty fire up a applications at the same time (like is not uncommon in a classroom environment, be prepared to wait a bit). > >On MS-DOS, the network card can only be used by one application >(Novell, telnet, etc) at a time unless you have something like FTP's >packet driver. Will the Mac allow a workstation to run telnet and >read/write to a disk mounted from a file server at the same time? TCP/IP applications like telnet and ftp can run independently of AppleTalk applications like printing and file serving (like AppleShare and TOPS). However, if you are using TCP/IP applications that don't use MacTCP, you can only use them one at a time (like NCSA telnet 2.2 and MacMH). When applications switch over to using MacTCP, then you can run time simultaneously under MultiFinder. > >How good is AppleShare? will it provide good performance for 20 >workstations on Localtalk? Again, the performance is like floppy disks. Benchmarks that others have done indicate that while AppleShare isn't as fast for a single user than other file servers, it doesn't degrade as quickly with more users, so performance under load is acceptible. > >The ethernet cards for the Mac are very expensive, and I am not sure >we can afford 20 of them. Is localtalk fast enough to provide >reasonable performance? As above. > >I would also like to hear some peoples experiences with Macintosh labs. >How do you deal with viruses? How is you Mac lab set up? How many Macs >on a segment of localtalk cable? what file server do you use and what >do you think of it? We have a lab with 29 Mac SEs and use 2 Mac II as file servers. A microvax is used to do print spooling (and keeps some accounting info) and e-mail, which is in the experimental stage. The Macs are connected to a StarController and then to a FastPath. Since the SEs only have floppy disks and the file server is read-only, I think we minimized the possible spread of virii to students exchanging disks. We do have virus detection and removal software on the servers. Setting up AppleShare accounts on the Mac IIs is a headache, since there is no way to do a bulk load of accounts. Other than that, with the extra software that I wrote on Unix and the Mac, things work pretty well. > >If any body is interested I will provide a summary of the answers I get. > >Thanks > >Matt Brookover >Computing and Information Resources >University of Denver >internet: mbrookov@nike.cair.du.edu [130.253.1.14] >uucp: ncar!dunike!mbrookov Edward Moy Principal Programmer - Macintosh & Unix Workstation Support Services Workstation Software Support Group University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 edmoy@violet.Berkeley.EDU ucbvax!violet!edmoy