chip@pender.ee.upenn.edu (Charles H. Buchholtz) (01/24/89)
I am interested in buying a cayman GatorBox to connect our twenty Macs with our 15 Suns. However, I have heard some rumors that I'd like to check out. One is that the GatorBox is VaporWare. Is there anyone out there using one? Could you please send me a description of your experience with the GatorBox? The second is that the GatorBox has trouble booting on a busy net. Has anyone experienced this? Thank you for your help. If I get a lot of responses, I'll summarize for the net. Charles H. Buchholtz chip@ee.upenn.edu Systems Programmer (215) 898-2284 Department of Electrical Engineering 200 S. 33rd St, rm 328 University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104
jeff@tc.fluke.COM (Jeff Stearns) (02/04/89)
In article <7283@netnews.upenn.edu> chip@pender.ee.upenn.edu (Charles H. Buchholtz) writes: >I am interested in buying a cayman GatorBox to connect our twenty Macs >with our 15 Suns. However, I have heard some rumors that I'd like to >check out. > >One is that the GatorBox is VaporWare. Is there anyone out there >using one? Could you please send me a description of your experience >with the GatorBox? My GB has sufficiently high vapor pressure to hold a serial number: 000291. It's a few months old. For the record, I am running software release 1.30. It works generally as expected, although there are a few unfinished features: there isn't presently any SMTP support nor whatever printer support was originally promised. It *does* emulate a FastPath, and KIP and MAC-IP code works fine. I use Columbia's CAP code to drive some LaserWriters through it. I use NCSA telnet to talk through the GB to a variety of hosts on Ethernet. The GB has a few problems with mapping between UNIX directory permissions and AppleShare folder permissions. T Performance isn't as good as I'd like. In particular, opening large folders should be at least twice as fast to please me. Large applications with monolithic CODE segments are slow to start up. NCSA telnet is a particularly horrible example at over 60 seconds! On the other hand, performance is sufficiently good so that reading or writing data files is generally not a bottleneck. I expect performance to improve in future releases. Note that our NFS fileservers are very fast and are unquestionably not the bottleneck here. The manual isn't very good; compare it to a Trailblazer manual. It contains a number of untruths. >The second is that the GatorBox has trouble booting on a busy net. >Has anyone experienced this? My GB boots fine on a LocalTalk net of about 15 hosts. I recently reconfigured it to boot via TFTP from a Sun fileserver over its Ethernet connection; it boots just fine in this configuration as well. At no time have I ever seen a boot failure I could reasonably attribute to problems on a "busy net". I've probably booted it about 40 times. For the record, Cayman can be reached at 617-494-1999. P.S. Cayman's Tech support is absolutely top notch. -- Jeff Stearns John Fluke Mfg. Co, Inc. (206) 356-5064 jeff@tc.fluke.COM {uw-beaver,microsoft,sun}!fluke!jeff PS - Calling all users of the Vitalink TransLAN IV Ethernet bridge! Please drop me a line.