mccaslan@cs.utk.edu (Donald McCasland) (09/11/90)
I've now got the latest distribution of CAP5.0 and I'm at a loss as to what to do with it...In the installation instructions it says something about running KIP and I've gotten hints that for CAP to be any use I have to run UAB...Would someone out there please clue me in to which direction I should head? I've got macii's running on a K-box version 4. And my unix server will be a sun4/280. I've got the cap+ distribution from gatekeeper.dec.com and nothing else...I'm especially lacking in clues. Thanks, Don McCasland mccaslan@cs.utk.edu
hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) (09/13/90)
CAP as originally implemented supports only what is now referred to as IPTalk, i.e. Appletalk packets encapsulated in UDP (one of the protocols in the TCP/IP protocol suite). This method of handling Appletalk on Ethernet was invented before Ethertalk was widespread (indeed I think before it as invented). The original configuration was Macs on Localtalk (then called simply Appletalk), Unix servers on Ethernets running CAP, and routers to connect Localtalk to Ethernet. These routers used the normal Localtalk encapsulationon on the Localtalk side, and IPTalk on the Ethernet side. The routers talked to each other and to the Unix boxes via IPTalk. This meant that the campus network didn't have to know anything about Ethertalk. Since Appletalk was carried across the campus encapsulated in TCP/IP, the campus network only had to know how to route TCP/IP. You can still use this configuration. Indeed if you don't have any Mac II's, and your network isn't very big it may work fine. The original routers were homebrew things built using plans from Stanford. The code they ran was called KIP. I use the term "KIP" exclusively to refer to that specific software. There is commercial code that does the same thing, which I refer to either by the name of the specific product, or genericaly as "an Appletalk router that supports IPTalk". The CAP documentation was written before there were commerical products that support IPTalk, so it assumes you are using KIP. Where it talks about KIP, you can just as well use any commercial router that has IPTalk enabled. To complicate things further, Kinetics made a commercial product that ran a version of the KIP software (as an alternative to Kinetics' own software). This was the famous KFPS-2. However a lot has changed since those early days. Apple has now defined an Appletalk encapsulation for Ethernet, called Ethertalk. We now have Ethernet boards for Macs, so a Mac can sit directly on Ethernet. A Mac on Ethernet will almost certainly talk Ethertalk, not IPTalk. Since IPTalk is not an official Apple standard, Apple's software does not support it. The routers used to build campus networks generally speak Ethertalk now. And networks are getting complex enough that the quasi-static routing used by IPTalk is no longer so attractive. Thus most large Appletalk networks now have Ethertalk on at least some of their Ethernets. Current routers now support Localtalk, IPTalk and Ethertalk. This is certainly true of the commercial products. Ethertalk support was also added to KIP, but there's some question about how reliable it is. So now people tend to use Localtalk to talk to Mac pluses, Ethertalk for Mac II's and various commercial Unix and VMS software that supports Ethertalk, and IPTalk only to talk to Unix systems that are still running CAP. The resulting combination of routing technology can get quite exciting, particularly in large networks. But if you don't want to buy commercial software for your Unix machines, IPTalk was the only easy way to get Appletalk to them. This required you to use an Appletalk router with IPTalk support enabled (which is what that CAP documentation means when it says KIP). Until recently. There are now versions of CAP that support Ethertalk. This allows you to build a network that uses only Localtalk and Ethertalk. In that case you don't need KIP at all (or if you use commercial routers, you don't need to enable IPTalk on them). There are two approaches to doing Ethertalk with CAP: The UAB was the first method. It creates two virtual hosts on your Unix machine. One is the virtual host on which the servers run. This uses a slightly modified version of the CAP software. The other virtual host is UAB itself. UAB is a software Appletalk router that speaks on one side to the virtual host running the servers. On the other side it speaks Ethertalk out your Ethernet port. UAB is currently supported for SunOS and VAX Unix. The other approach to handling Ethertalk is a modified version of the CAP software that talks Ethertalk directly. With this version, UAB is not needed. Currently it is available only for SunOS, though it should be possible to port it to most Unix systems. It needs the following (1) the Ethernet packet filter (from 4.3) or Sun's /dev/nit, (2) Sun's RPC (which should be present on any system that supports NFS), and (3) mmap (and the code could easily be changed to use System V shared memory). Anyway, the upshot of the deal is that in order to talk Appletalk on your Unix system you need one of the following: - original CAP on any Unix system, and an Appletalk router that supports IPTalk. The KIP software on a KFPS-2 is one possible hardware/software combination, but surely not one that any new installation would use. - UAB with a slightly modified CAP. Since this uses Ethertalk, it should work with any current Appletalk technology. - CAP modified to speak Ethertalk directly. Again, it should work with any current Appletalk technology. Note that UAB and the modified CAP support only Ethertalk Phase I. Sorry.
hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) (09/13/90)
I just sent a general explanation of CAP, KIP, etc. For your specific configuration, which seems to be Localtalk, Ethernet, KFPS, and a Sun 4, things are real simple. You should use anonymous FTP to athos.rutgers.edu, and retrieve from the pub directory etalk.tar.Z, enet.shar, and etalk-conversion.doc. etalk.tar.Z contains the version of CAP set up for Ethertalk, with binaries for Sun 4. I believe you can do "make install" to install the software, though it may not install a couple of things (atis and aarpd, both of which I'd put in /usr/local/cap). There is documentation with it. etalk-conversion.doc is a cookbook for moving from an old CAP version to Ethertalk. In fact I think those instructions are good enough for setting up Ethertalk CAP from scratch, except that you'll need to look at man pages for the daemons to know how to set them up. enet.shar tells you have to install the Ethernet packet filter in your kernel. (No source is needed, but you must have 4.0.3 or later.) There's an alternative version that uses /dev/nit if you absolutely refuse to modify your kernel. I believe the documentation describes how to use it. With this software, you set up your KFPS4 in the obvious way. No IPTalk is needed to talk Appletalk to the Sun. However you will want to half-configure IPTalk if you intend to use things like NCSA telnet on your Mac. (They need a subset of the IPTalk support to assign IP addresses.) The idea is that you turn on IPTalk on the KFPS 4, and give it an IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, and number of hosts. But you don't put in a zone name or network number for the IPTalk, nor do you give it the address of an atalkatab administrator host. If you're using the newest KFPS 4 software, there will be buttons for how to get IPTalk configuration info, offering atalkd, tftp, or none. Choose none.