malpass@LL-VLSI.ARPA (Don Malpass) (05/03/88)
Ouch - I've misled all of you. The Ethernet connection is from an AT-clone at work, and I know of no such facility for a Z-100 (which is why I also asked about Fastback on -100's). At work, I (euphemism for "government", aka "taxpayer", aka "I") bought Sun's "PC-NFS" package of software and (3-Com) card, all for about $600 after MIT's discount of around 30%. It provides full NFS (network file system), FTP, and TELNET capability to/from my PC. The card simply plugs into the AT bus, and I ran a twisted-pair ribbon cable to the nearest Ethernet fanout box in the lab, which was about 35 ft away. Another type of connection, using mini-coax, also exists on the card, but I didn't investigate it since it wasn't appropriate for our cable taps. The software is VERY well done, and VERY well documented. Installing it was easy. The floppys contain several files to be installed on the Sun, and I simply transferred them via kermit and let the Sun guru do what the manual directed. I ran the PC install program which modifies autoexec.bat and config.sys, and I've since done some fine tuning for personal convenience. My only objection to any of it is that I had made the AT/PC (as well as my Z-100 at home) look as much like UNIX as I could, and Sun, for perfectly appropriate reasons, has tried to make the UNIX system I'm connected to look as much like MS-DOS as they could to a PC user. They had to because of file name conventions, among other things. But other than that, I'm very happy with it. If I had a -100 at work and saw a PC with this facility, I'd be salivating for it. Having a gigabyte or so of storage as drive g: is very handy for a lot of things, as well as eliminating the need for slow kermit transfers. The telnet that comes with it makes the PC look like a (you should excuse the expression) VT100, but I can live with that in order to get my old terminal out of my office. This is a lot faster than using the terminal at 9600 baud - vi updates the screen immediately, for instance. And even without telnet, I can access or edit Sun files simply by getting to them through drive g:, although for the reasons mentioned, the file names and subdirectory names sometimes have to be translated when I'm using dos programs (e.g. pc-vi) on unix files. The bottom line though is that it is great! don [malpass@LL-vlsi.arpa]