demarsee@ICARUS.CNS.SYR.EDU (Darryl E. Marsee) (09/08/89)
I seem to be having a compatibility problem with the Personal Service Network (PSN) by Information Presentation Technologies (IPT) and all of the Mac-based IP services (Mac-IP, Mac-MH, NCSA Telnet, Brown TN3270) I have. For those who don't know, PSN is an AppleShare-compatible server product that runs in the background of a Mac, thus eliminating the need for a dedicated Mac to run AppleShare on. Note that PSN seems to be AppleShare version 1 compatible, not version 2, for there is no copy protection or CD-ROM support. For the most part, PSN works as advertised. The problems (features?) I've found with it are the following: (1) PSN doesn't allow a true "Guest" login as does AppleShare. It does, however, allow you to define a userid (such as GUEST or ANONYMOUS) to which you can assign the equivalent access privileges. (2) PSN's licensing is aimed directly at the TOPS crowd. For buying an N-user version of PSN, you get N number of disks to put servers on N number of machines, each of which can handle N number of concurrent users logged in. A ballpark price figure in dollars for PSN is 100(N) + 100. While IPT is undoubtedly looking at a fully-distributed computing environment (N macs running as both a server and client, as TOPS does), I don't see any reason why alternatively you couldn't have N limited-access servers, each serving a differnet clientel, since you only need the AppleShare client software to access a PSN server. I think they should also offer an N-user version of PSN that has only 1 disk, so it would run only 1 server, at a lower cost than their N-user/N-server version. Then they would not only be an alternative to TOPS; they would also be a possible alternative to true AppleShare, especially for smaller sites that don't want (or can't) dedicate a full Mac to the server task. (3) The compatibliity problem, mentioned in the opening. When PSN is running on a LocalTalk-connected Mac, none of the IP products mentioned above are able to work. They act much like they do when you try to fire up one while another is running; they seem to not be able to communicate with the Kinetics box. I don't have MacTCP yet, so I don't know if this will alleviate the problem. However, when PSN is running on a EtherTalk-connected Mac, the IP products work just fine, presumably since the Kinetics box is no longer involved. Am I experiencing a socket conflict while running PSN on a LocalTalk-connected Mac, or is there some other explaination for this behavior? Regards, Darryl Marsee Syracuse University