gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (04/03/88)
garrett@udel.EDU (Joel Garrett) wrote: > Is anyone working on an AppleShare server for A/UX? How about X-Windows? If AppleShare has anything to do with AppleTalk (now renamed LocalTalk), probably nothing will happen until Apple releases A/UX support for LocalTalk. You can't even hook up a LaserWriter with it. Apple has an internal X10 that they demo but won't ship. They are "working on" X11. You can get an A/UX port of Sun's NeWS window system from us (MacNews); the first release just came out. > Would a beefed-out II make a decent NFS server for a lab of IIs, or would > something like a Sun-server be a better idea? No, a Mac-II makes a poor disk server, for two reasons that I know of: * Its Ethernet card can't handle 8 back-to-back packets. How do I know? I hooked up my Sun to access the Mac's disk (we have a 300MB Jasmine Wren-IV drive which we copied the A/UX disk onto, then diddled the partition maps). Writing a file from the Sun to the Mac hangs unless you specify a small write size (wsize=1k) in the "mount" command on the Sun. If you don't, it tries to write 8K to the Mac as a burst of 8 1K packets. The Mac drops some of these, the Sun retries, the Mac drops them, and they do that for a long time. It might work as a Mac serving a Mac, but won't work with any machine which has a modern Ethernet interface and a fast CPU. * A/UX has a System V filesystem. Not only does this give you brain damaged 14 character file names, but it means that files are allocated all over the disk, requiring a lot of seeking to get them back. One-word summary: slow. In summary, even if you are a big Mac fan, get a Sun or Pyramid or Sequent or something as your disk server. -- {pyramid,pacbell,amdahl,sun,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com "Don't fuck with the name space!" -- Hugh Daniel
root@sbcs.sunysb.edu (SBCS Systems Staff) (04/03/88)
We are able to overrun a Mac/AUX NFS server using our NFS client running on an Amiga (7.16 mHz 68000) - what is wrong with Apples Ethernet card? Does Apple supply reconfig rights for their Unix so that one could drop in a different Ethernet card? Rick Spanbauer SUNY/Stony Brook (& Ameristar)