pascal@CAM.ORG (Pascal Gosselin) (11/16/90)
To all of those who have patiently waited for Farallon's release of version 3.0 of Liaison, the wait is finally over. I received my upgrade today and was luckily able to trash the very crash-prone Apple Internet Router. Installation: Things didn't go as smoothly as planned. Liaison 3.0 doesn't work properly with the Emac Speedlink v2.5 driver when EtherTalk is selected as the "home port". The home port is the port on which the Appletalk services of the Mac running the router is located. The solution proposed by Tech Support was to relocate the home port on the LocatTalk port. This cured the freeze-up problem at startup without sacrificing speed. I will be shipping them a copy of the driver for analysis tomorrow (the problem occurs with an SE, I haven't had the time to try other CPUs yet). All ports run at full speed! Yes, this is a great feature of version 3.0. The home port is purely cosmetical, no routing is required from any zone that is physically connected to the router (when accessing AppleTalk services on the router Mac). Security still weak: I was expecting to see some kind of Packet-level security to hide LaserWriters, Mail servers, File Servers, etc... The press release claimed "new" security features. I haven't found any. The only thing you can do is to completely hide one zone from another (quite useless). AppleTalk Phase II support (finally!) with a bit of confusion: The Phase II support seems to work fine, this is great news to those like myself who use EtherTalk cards that require AppleTalk version 53 to be installed in order to work properly. This caused havoc under Liasion 2.0.6. The biggest flaw is the installation process, which fails to distinguish between Phase I and II drivers upon setup. It is a minor hassle noted on a release sheet, but it bugs me a bit! CCL support: Sounds great but I haven't used it yet. Conclusion: I just hope that it is more reliable that Apple's AIR, which has been one huge headache for me in the past 2 months (constant crashing of our AppleShare file server). Only time will tell !!! -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Pascal Gosselin | Internet: Pascal@cam.org Applelink: CDA0585 | | Gest-Mac Inc. Apple VAR | Voice (514) 767-4444 Fax (514) 767-7337 | +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+