bruce%Central@sun.com (Bruce Samuelson) (12/15/88)
The solution given below is not much cheaper than buying a second, bottom end PostScript printer, but does offer some connectivity advantages. For hardware, we bought a FastPath gateway from Kinetics, Inc., a division of Excelan. It connects Ethernet running TCP/IP and UDP/IP to LocalTalk running AppleTalk. You should be able to buy it for around $2000, university pricing. It works fine, and we haven't had any problems with it. You might want to request that Kinetics include a Macintosh diskette with public domain software from the U of Illinois called NCSA Telnet. It enables you to FTP files between a Mac and a Sun and also enables you to use a Mac as a terminal to the Suns. It comes with VT 100 emulation, and you can have several VT 100 windows open on the Mac simultaneously. Kinetics, Inc., 2540 Camino Diablo, Walnut Creek, CA, 415-947-0998. For an AppleTalk-aware print spooler, we originally bought K-Spool from the same company for $495. Although the company claims it works, it never did on our Sun. We replaced it with TOPS for the Sun, which should cost you around $700-800 educational price. It includes the TOPS networking software for the Sun and support for spooling print jobs over Ethernet, through the gateway, and to a LaserWriter which is connected as a node on the LocalTalk network. The TOPS networking software is very similar to NFS, and in fact Sun plans to merge it with NFS in a year or so. TOPS provides convenient file sharing between DOS, Mac, and Sun nodes. Ask your Sun salesman for details about it (Sun has acquired the company that makes TOPS). You'll have to pay extra to set up Macs or DOS machines as TOPS nodes, although you don't need to do so to solve your print spooling problem.
david%pyr@gatech.edu (David Brown) (12/22/88)
One other alternative worth looking at is the GatorBox, by Cayman Systems
(617-494-1999). It looks and acts like a Kinetics box, but also
translates AppleTalk Filing Protocol requests into NFS requests, so that
any of your NFS servers can also be AppleTalk servers. It should support
printing from a Sun to an Apple early next year. In the mean time, you
can run CAP from Columbia. The price for the GB is about the same as a
Kinetics box (~$3000.00), it just provides a couple more nice features.
David Brown
David Brown
Armstrong State College, Savannah, Georgia
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