shull@desci.wharton.upenn.edu (Christopher E. Shull) (05/29/91)
Hi!
One of the programs here at Penn bought a bunch of Mac IIcx's and the
like without hard disks but with Ethernet cards, the goal being to allow
fast access to programs and data on an Apple File Server, while protecting
them from abuse, and avoiding the abuse vulnerability of local hard disks.
Now they have a problem however. They want to use MacTCP and NCSA Telnet
to connect to remote systems, but they have no way of assigning IP
addresses to *all* the startup diskettes that are currently circulating,
ie. in the hands of students, faculty and staff. Further, they are faced
with people copying one another's startup diskettes and then working on
two machines at the same time, which would lead to non-unique IP numbers,
which would be bad!
So, their choices seem to be:
1) buy hard disks for all the machines and try to protect them from
abuse, or
2) find a way to dynamically assign IP numbers on Ethernet.
Now I know the Cayman GatorBox does this on the LocalTalk side, but it
does not seem to able to do this on the Ethernet side. Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance!
-Chris
Christopher E. Shull shull@wharton.upenn.edu
Decision Sciences Department shull@desci.wharton.upenn.edu
The Wharton School University of Pennsylvania
3620 Locust Walk voice: 215/898-5930
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6366 fax: 215/898-3664
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"Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!" Admiral Farragut, USN, 1801-1870
---------------------------------------------------------------------------dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner) (05/29/91)
>2) find a way to dynamically assign IP numbers on Ethernet. > >Now I know the Cayman GatorBox does this on the LocalTalk side, but it >does not seem to able to do this on the Ethernet side. A while ago this was pointed out as one of the very few features of the FastPath not duplicated on the Gatorbox; the FastPath will dynamically assign IP address on EtherNet. (Or so people said.) I seem to recall that Cayman was going to add the feature, but I might be wrong. If you have a gatorbox, you might drop support@cayman.com a line; they'll know if there's anything you can do. IF you have a particularly tolerant IP gateway (I mean IP gateway now, not DDP-IP gateway), you might try the "Dynamic" option. My understanding is that MacTCP will then find an IP number for which no one responds to an ARP, and use that. You'll need a tolerant gateway in case an IP address previously in use on one Mac gets reused on another; many gateways will not tolerate such be- havior, and persist in the belief that the first mac is still the right one for the IP address. -- Steve Dorner, U of Illinois Computing Services Office Internet: s-dorner@uiuc.edu UUCP: uunet!uiucuxc!uiuc.edu!s-dorner
jqj@duff.uoregon.edu (JQ Johnson) (05/30/91)
If you really need dynamically assigned IP addresses on Ethernet then you have a problem. I don't think you do, though. If you select "Server" from the MacTCP options, then your Mac will look for a bootp server when it boots up. You can run bootp on any friendly Unix box to assign the Mac an IP address based on the Ethernet address (i.e. on the hardware), freeing you from the tyranny of the startup diskette. Most versions of bootp don't do true dynamic IP address assignment. The network admin still has to keep track of the list of Ethernet interfaces on the network, and has to statically assign IP addresses to interfaces. However, this is a lot easier than assigning IP addresses to startup diskettes, and has the advantage of also providing other information that MacTCP needs like the default gateway and subnet mask. -- JQ Johnson Director of Network Services Internet: jqj@oregon.uoregon.edu University of Oregon voice: (503) 346-1746 250E Computing Center BITNET: jqj@oregon Eugene, OR 97403-1212 fax: (503) 346-4397
seiffert@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (05/30/91)
We are using a PC to do it. We have an XT with clarkson university's LPD
software. This is usually used for serving printing for UNIX machines or
such. However, it has a BootP server built into it. MacTCP can query ther
BootP server for IP#, gateway# and nameserver information.
You do have to setup a bootp table that contains the ethernet # of each
machine and then assigns an IP# to that ethernet #. Works fine for us.
Let me know if you would like some more information.
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