hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) (03/21/91)
>On a question of curiosity though, could someone tell me what the >advantage of using UAB is though? I assume it would not be that >hard to port - although perhaps I am mistaken? - and if someone >thinks it is more reliable/efficient than the IPTalk method, >perhaps we would have a look at it! RU-CAP2 has three possible configurations: IPtalk, UAB, Ethertalk. UAB was done before the native Ethertalk. I believe for most purposes Ethertalk replaces it. UAB is more general. In theory you could use it as an Appletalk bridge. But for most people I doubt that UAB is of much interest anymore. Whether to use IPtalk or Ethertalk depends upon what kind of systems you want to talk with and your overall Appletalk network architecture. advantages of IPtalk: - causes less broadcast traffic - allows you to use it with a campus-wide network whose routers only support IP - can be implemented on any Unix system that supports TCP/IP. (Ethertalk requires special low-level Ethernet support. This is not available at all on some systems, and even when it is available, details are different on each system.) advantages of Ethertalk - will talk directly to a Mac that is on the same Ethernet. (Since Macs don't support IPtalk, traffic between Macs and IPtalk will have to go through a router. This is not a concern if your Macs are mostly on Localtalk, since they'll need to go through a router anyway.) - use normal Appletalk routing. (Traffic between two IPtalk hosts is routed as IP. This is fine if your backbone network is pure IP. But if you have do some Appletalk routing, then networks that have IPtalk can get confusing to manage, as Appletalk routing tables don't show what is going on with the IPtalk portion of your network.) Generally here are the sorts of recommendations I make: use Ethertalk - if you have Ethernet cards on your Macs, and just want Macs to talk to a Unix machine on the same network - if your campus network has Appletalk routers, or multiprotocol routers with Appletalk enabled use IPtalk - if your Macs are almost entirely on Localtalk - if you want to avoid having to route two different protocols on your campus backbone network - if Ethertalk support for your Unix machines isn't available - if the design of Ethertalk offends you