roy@phri.UUCP (05/15/87)
We're considering buying a Kinetics Fastpath ethernet-appletalk box
so we can share our LaserWriters between our Macs and our BSD Unix machines
(Vax and Suns). Any opinions, good or bad, on the Fastpath would be
appreciated.
What about their IP implementation on the Mac? Supposedly they
have telnet running on the Mac, which means they have TCP/IP running. How
complete is this? Does it do the whole schear (ICMP, named, etc) or is it
just enough to get telnet working? If it doesn't run named, how does it
do hostname->[w.x.y.z] mapping? Are you supposed to maintain a host table
on your Mac?
It seems to me that the real cheap way to get our Macs talking to
our Unix machines would be to implement SLIP on the Mac and plug the modem
port into the back of a Sun which also talks SLIP (right now we run kermit
over such a link; workable, but ugh!). Then, all you gotta do is port
telnet (apparently already done) and lpr/lpd to the Mac and you have bare
bones terminal emulation and line printer access for free (no hardware
costs anyway). Am I crazy for thinking this might work?
--
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016