Access limitations(?), and moving to a simple LAN

I've no LAN yet, but yesterday (with Govind Kharbanda's help) connected
my newish Iyonix (RO 5.09) to my RPC (RO 3.7), using one Cat5 cable.
Access was enabled in both machines, and TCP/IP left turned off in both.

When both machines were rebooted Access seemed to work ok from either
machine.

When we tried enabling TCP/IP in both machines (via Configure) with
suitable definitions in place, both machines were able to ping the
other. When we were doing this I removed my normal ANT Suite Internet
stuff from the RPC's boot-up, so only the Configure definitions/
processing were in place.

But, although Access was turned on in both, and - on the surface
appeared to work - eg a "Discs" icon was visible on both machines' icon
bars, actually trying to use Access didn't work. The Iyonix couldn't
see shares defined on the RPC. On the RPC we saw aborts, disappearance
of the "Discs" icon, and on subsequent attempts I've also seen sections
of white-on-black writing appear at the top of the GUI display. The
writing contains snippets of words like "ShareFS" and "exec", and
F12-enter doesn't make it go away (or perhaps it goes, but it comes
back).

Is the idea of Access just to provide disk sharing between two RO
machines on the ends of one cable? Can it handle >2 machines? If I
had several RO machines each with a cable to a network hub/switch would
Access allow sharing between all of them?

Is Access meant to work if TCP/IP is turned on?

At the moment the simplicity of Access is appealing, not least because
it seems to work if (on the RPC, with TCP/IP not enabled in Configure)
I then start my existing copy of the ANT Suite (which uses a dial-up
connection). That at least gives me news/mail etc, and file sharing.


I've a TeleWest cable broadband connection, hardly ever used, here and
unfortunately at the moment the cable modem won't power on (the PSU
seems dead - investigation with a multimeter shows mains gets in to it
but nothing comes out). TeleWest are coming on Monday to look at it.
Assuming they can make it work with my ancient W95 PC, I want then to
plug the cable modem into a router (Vigor 2300) and plug the RPC and
Iyo into that.

When I turn TCP/IP on in the RO machines, should I expect to have to
turn Access off?


Ideally, while I get to grips with setting up internet connectivity on
the Iyonix, using the cable broadband connection, I'd like to keep the
dial-up connectivity working on the RPC. Obviously I can definitely do
that if there's no connection from the RPC either directly to the Iyo,
or to the router - the RPC would be a standalone machine. But if it's
standalone, copying files to the Iyonix will be a pain! Equally
obviously I could turn off TCP/IP in both machines and re-enable Access
when I need to move files, but that would also be a pain.

Incidentally, can one turn Access on/off without rebooting both
machines? Or RMKill & RMReInit something or other at each end and
expect that to work?


Does it make sense for me to be able to have the machines connected
here, eg as 10.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.2, and also be able to make a dial-up
link to Demon from the RPC? I know that Demon allocate static IP
addresses - mine is 158.152.58.5 - but that doesn't make sense in terms
of a LAN's 10.0.0.x addresses. I don't understand what device actually
has the 158.152.58.5 address - is it something on the other side of
Demon's modems, or is it something in the IP stack on the RPC, only
pingable when the underlying dial-up connection is working? Can two
such connections co-exist here?

I know that it's possible to define both dial-up and LAN-based
connections in the ANT Suite's configuration dialogues, though I don't
know what that actually does, nor how one tells the Suite which
connection to actually use, assuming that it routes traffic over one or
the other but not both.



Apart from the transition time, I think I'd like to keep the ability to
dial into Demon (and maybe another ISP I have an account with) as a
backup/alternate way of sending news/mail for times that the TW cable
connection isn't working. I don't require that to be on the RPC,
necessarily - is there a way to define both a broadband and dial-up
connections on the internet software on the Iyonix?

--
Jeremy C B Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
.

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