Re: AppleTalk and Netatalk redeux

David Schmenk wrote:

Dragging this dead horse back to beat it. I scored a Gatorbox on ePay,

Just wondering, how much are they going for now? I bought some about
10 years ago for a school networking project. I think I got them for
a few dollars, plus shipping. At the time, the software was available
on the web, if I remember right along with the passwords to make it work.

(snip)
On an AppleTalk network, there needs to be a device that names the segment, and optionally routes between segments. I think a segment is simply all the devices on the same cable. I don't fully understand but these segments can apparently be broken down into smaller nets, but still part of the physical segment.

There are zones, the human readable names, and network addresses.
The interaction between them is not so obvious.

Since our IIs only work on the LocalTalk topology, and everything else is ethernet, something has to translate. The two devices I have to connect between LocalTalk and Ethernet are the AsanteTalk and the Gatorbox. These are roughly analogous to an ethernet hub for the AsanteTalk, and an ethernet router for the Gatorbox.

The gatorbox IS an appletalk router. Maybe you meant analogous
to an IP router. There are also DECnet routers and IPX routers,
and some that can do all four at the same time.

> The AsanteTalk simply passes packets from one net to the other.
> It is somewhat transparent.

Only somewhat. You can't pass all the EtherTalk traffic to
LocalTalk. What it does is closer to finding out which
hosts are on the LocalTalk side, and pretending to be those
hosts on EtherTalk, then passing the appropriate data through.
I believe there are limits on how many can be on the LocalTalk
side. (Lower than the LocalTalk limit.)

> The Gatorbox actually sets up the network segment
and is more sophisticated. Because of this, netatalk has to be configured differently for each device. With the AsanteTalk, you want the netatalk machine to be the network manager, called a seed router. The netatalk machine is responsible for handing this information out whenever a new machine on the segment asks. Past posts have worked out the configuration for atalkd.conf to look something like:

eth0 -seed -phase 2 -net 1 -addr 1.6 -zone "MYnet"

Maybe even better to have both atalkd and the GatorBox as seed
routers.

When using the Gatorbox, you want the netatalk machine to look to the Gatorbox for network configuration, so atalkd.conf looks simply like:

eth0 -phase 2

Now, when atalkd finds out the network configuration, it actually rewrites atalkd.conf. Mine looks like:

eth0 -phase 2 -net 500-599 -addr 552.81 -zone "ISDnet"

after getting network configuration from the Gatorbox.

The next step is figuring out the a2boot sequence. It may be that the AsanteTalk makes this easier, as all the configuration can happen in netatalk. With the Gatorbox, it doesn't put my Linux server in the default net name where the Apple II looks for a boot server. I see GATORnet and ISDnet. I have no way to configure the Gatorbox, so I'm sort of stuck.

I think when I did it, I completely reloaded the gatorbox software,
which then allows one to select a password.

Well, I don't know if anyone is actually using this stuff anymore, but thought I would post it for searchability in the future.

Good idea.

-- glen

.

Relevant Pages

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