peter@aucs.UUCP (Peter Steele) (05/18/89)
We have a Mac network here (using MacJANET) and one of our biggest
problems is having insufficient room on the boot disks we distribute
to put anything more than a small selection of fonts and DAs.
I have in mind a possible solution to this problem, but I don't know
if it's possible. What I'd like to do is after a user has connected to
the file server, have a program run that opens a public, read-only fonts
file (on the server of course) that contains all the fonts that the user
needs. The boot disk itself could be configured to have the minimum fonts
required--Geneva, Monaco, and Chicago--leaving room on the boot disk for
other more useful things likes inits and cdevs.
What I am suggesting is obviously something like Suitcase, but Suitcase
doesn't do what we want (we couldn't distribute it to students anyway--we'd
have to have a copy of the init on each boot disk we give out, which is
300 or more, and the students get to keep the boot disks). We need to have
an application that launches just after login is completed that opens the
necessary font files and makes them available to future running applications.
Is this as simple as opening the resource file and leaving it open after
the program completes, or is there something more involved in setting up
this sort of "Suitcase" like concept. Being able to launch the program
after login is not a problem--we have control at this point and can do
anything we want to program (provided the program is small enough to
fit on the boot disk--we use LSPascal as it seems to give compact code).
And of course, we would like the same thing done for DAs. I presume the
approach for DAs would be different than that for fonts, but can DAs
also be handled in the fashion I've described?
I would appeciate any information that anyone can give me on this idea.
Since only about 70% of this news group makes it to our site, please
post your responses to me if you can (as well as to the net). Thanx!
--
Peter Steele, Microcomputer Applications Analyst
Acadia University, Wolfville, NS, Canada B0P1X0 (902)542-2201x121
UUCP: {uunet|watmath|utai|garfield}!dalcs!aucs!Peter
BITNET: Peter@Acadia Internet: Peter%Acadia.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDUccml@levels.sait.edu.au (Martin) (06/24/89)
In article <1887@aucs.UUCP>, peter@aucs.UUCP (Peter Steele) writes: > We have a Mac network here (using MacJANET) and one of our biggest > problems is having insufficient room on the boot disks we distribute > to put anything more than a small selection of fonts and DAs. We have the same problem, our solution is to copy all the fonts and DAs we want people to be able to use into each application. It seems to work well, although it probably increases network activity somewhat. Martin Leadbeater S.Aust. Institute of Technology ACSnet: ccml@edgar.sait.oz{.au}
peter@aucs.UUCP (Peter Steele) (06/28/89)
>> We have a Mac network here (using MacJANET) and one of our biggest >> problems is having insufficient room on the boot disks we distribute >> to put anything more than a small selection of fonts and DAs. > > We have the same problem, our solution is to copy all the fonts and > DAs we want people to be able to use into each application. It seems > to work well, although it probably increases network activity somewhat. We've done that, of course, but find it a pain to maintain. It can really mess things up as well if someone has the regular Times font installed on their Mac at home and get the Adobe fonts we have installed in the applications--there's no way to override an application's fonts. There are rumours that MacJANET, the network software we use, will have a Suitcase like feature built into it on the next release.... -- Peter Steele, Microcomputer Applications Analyst Acadia University, Wolfville, NS, Canada B0P1X0 (902)542-2201x121 UUCP: {uunet|watmath|utai|garfield}!dalcs!aucs!Peter BITNET: Peter@Acadia Internet: Peter%Acadia.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
zben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston) (06/29/89)
> We have a Mac network here (using MacJANET) and one of our biggest > problems is having insufficient room on the boot disks we distribute > to put anything more than a small selection of fonts and DAs. At the MacWorld here in Washington one of the educational users described a scheme where a Suitcase on the boot disk allowed the fonts and DAs to reside on a central server machine. They had removed a critical resource from the Suitcase file to prevent it from appearing in the Apple menu. If there is interest I'll dig out my notes and post a reference... -- Sig DS.L ('ZBen') ; Ben Cranston <zben@umd2.UMD.EDU> * Computer Science Center Network Infrastructures Group * University of Maryland at College Park
dhom@cosmos.acs.calpoly.edu (David Hom) (06/29/89)
In article <5065@umd5.umd.edu> zben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston) writes: >> We have a Mac network here (using MacJANET) and one of our biggest >> problems is having insufficient room on the boot disks we distribute >> to put anything more than a small selection of fonts and DAs. > >At the MacWorld here in Washington one of the educational users described a >scheme where a Suitcase on the boot disk allowed the fonts and DAs to reside >on a central server machine. They had removed a critical resource from the >Suitcase file to prevent it from appearing in the Apple menu. If there is >interest I'll dig out my notes and post a reference... >-- I would love more info on the subject. Right now, we are using System 4.2 as boot disks on our network to save disk space. It would be great to use 6.0.3 and have plenty of fonts available for use :-) David dhom@cosmos.acs.calpoly.edu
peter@aucs.UUCP (Peter Steele) (06/29/89)
>> We have a Mac network here (using MacJANET) and one of our biggest >> problems is having insufficient room on the boot disks we distribute >> to put anything more than a small selection of fonts and DAs. > At the MacWorld here in Washington one of the educational users described a > scheme where a Suitcase on the boot disk allowed the fonts and DAs to reside > on a central server machine. They had removed a critical resource from the > Suitcase file to prevent it from appearing in the Apple menu. If there is > interest I'll dig out my notes and post a reference... Yes, but to use Suitcase one would need a licence for it for each boot disk distributed. Even at, say, $20 per Suitcase licence, we distribute over 300 boot disks a year. $6000 is a lot of bucks for us to spend on a somewhat minor problem. Fortunately, there are rumours that the next release of MacJANET may have a Suitcase like facility built in.... -- Peter Steele, Microcomputer Applications Analyst Acadia University, Wolfville, NS, Canada B0P1X0 (902)542-2201x121 UUCP: {uunet|watmath|utai|garfield}!dalcs!aucs!Peter BITNET: Peter@Acadia Internet: Peter%Acadia.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
chris@umbc5.umbc.edu (Chris Schanzle) (07/07/89)
<12179@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> dhom@cosmos.acs.calpoly.edu.UUCP (David Hom) writes: >In article <5065@umd5.umd.edu> zben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston) writes: >>> We have a Mac network here (using MacJANET) and one of our biggest >>> problems is having insufficient room on the boot disks we distribute >>> to put anything more than a small selection of fonts and DAs. >> >>At the MacWorld here in Washington one of the educational users described a >>scheme where a Suitcase on the boot disk allowed the fonts and DAs to reside >>on a central server machine. >I would love more info on the subject. Right now, we are using System 4.2 >as boot disks on our network to save disk space. It would be great to use >6.0.3 and have plenty of fonts available for use :-) >dhom@cosmos.acs.calpoly.edu There really is no "scheme" to do this. We have been using an AppleShare network with Mac II nodes consisting of only floppy disk drives. Summary: make the font files on the file server, boot off the floppy w/Appleshare and Suitecase resources installed, then load the font files using Suitcase. Suitcase will remember which volume the fonts were loaded from. For those of you without file servers, I suppose you could use another floppy disk, or a RAM disk if you have lots of RAM. Since I had three seperate font files ("old" laserwriter fonts, NTX fonts, and a slew of bitmapped fonts) and ran them through Font Harmony (as a group) to make certain there were no conflicting ID #'s. Copy them to a publically readable area on the hard disk. Prepare a floppy disk (with system 6.0.3 :-) without any but the most basic fonts. NOTE: If you have one size of a particular font (say, Geneva) on the system disk, and have (larger) sizes in file to be loaded with Suitcase, the latter will not be recognized. So add as many sizes of Geneva, Monico, and Chicago to the system file on the boot disk and leave them out of the font files on the file server. Obviously, put the AppleShare resources into the system file/folder (using the Installer on one of the 6.0.3 Utilities disk). Simply dragging the AppleShare chooser document into the System Folder is not sufficient! (rtfm...) Boot with your new floppy (with Suitcase installed) and verify (or make it so via chooser) that the AppleShare volume is on the desktop. Go into Suitcase, select Open Files, then simply open the font files that are residing on the file server. Suitecase will automatically remember which volume the font files were loaded from. >>They had removed a critical resource from the >>Suitcase file to prevent it from appearing in the Apple menu. If there is >>interest I'll dig out my notes and post a reference... >David That would be an interesting bit of information to have, but we don't like removing functionality of a program that we purchased for use in the lab. I locked a few resources in Suitcase and set the Protected bit so users would not be able to modify the default fonts loaded at boottime and wouldn't be able to copy the Suitecase file to their own floppies. Although I hated doing it, we checked out the mice (to keep them from escaping) and startup disks to users as they walked in the door and kept their ID while they had the equipment checked out. It does have good side effects tho (easy to track down people and building statistics on the usage of the lab). For those of you considering a similar lab, note that we do not have any hard disks installed in the user's Macs, but they are equipped with two or four Megs of RAM and two floppy disk drives. This allows us to use a ramdisk program to load the system disk into RAM (making it *faster* to access than a hard disk, albeit longer startup time). The startup disks can stay LOCKED so the users will not accidently save their files or otherwise screw up the startup disks -- a DEFINITE problem in any public lab situtation. We use the program "Ramdisk+ 2.08" with Suitcase version 1.2 (DON'T USE VERSIONS 1.2.1 OR 1.2.2 -- they have problems switch-launching to the Ramdisk on startup). A problem we have not solved, however, is WordPerfect for the Macintosh. It seems that temporary files AND backup files are written to the system disk (Ramdisk) whether you tell it to or not (version 1.0.1 -- 1.0.2 has destroyed its own files and the files it creates are sometimes incompatible with 1.0.1 -- even if you use the 4.2 inport/export options! Beware!). ARPA : chris@umbc5.umbc.edu BITNET : chris@umbc2 : nerwin!umbc5 : chris@puppy.ncsl.nist.gov [soon to be sunset.ncsl.nist.gov]