Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!TRINCC.BITNET!REWING From: REWING@TRINCC.BITNET Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk Subject: Re: More Appletalk Phase II Message-ID: Date: 20 Jun 89 21:04:00 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 67 To continue from my last posting, I will answer one question on how Appletalk Phase II does zones, and its interaction with older Macs running Phase I software. Using the Apple Internet Router, or any comparable product by Kinetics or Cayman or hayes, etc., localtalk and phonenet zones are configured ezactly as before. You assign it a net number and a zone, and its happy. For Ethernet or Token Ring networks, in order to get by the 255 node limit, you can assign an Ethernet or Token Ring wire to have several consecutive net numbers, for example, 2-4 would handle about 750 users, while 30-50 could handle over 4000. The more numbers you set aside, the more people you can have. The Ethertalk 2.0 or Tokentalk 2.0 software doesn't care which number you belong to, and will procede to find you a free node on one of them automatically. Then it saves what your net number is inside parameter RANM, so that the next time you boot, you will have the same number and will save the system all the crosstalk of people trying to get a unique net ID. The only chatter thatmay occur is if a new Mac is installed on an existing network, as it will procede tofind itself a unique ID, and store it away. Likewise, since you can have more than one net number on a wire, you can also do so with zones. Router will give you a dialog box that allows you to enter up to 255 (I think) zone names for use on that network. From there, when the Mac is first fired up, it will tell you that Appletalk is now present, and please choose your "home zone". You do this by selecting the network icon inthe control panel, and clicking onthe Ethertalk 2.0 or Tokentalk 2.0 icon. A dialog box will show up allowing you to pick your zone, which shall be your home from now on. You can change this zone later, if desired. Incidentally, because localtalk macs are phase I style, and smaller workgroup sizes, Router will only allow you to assign one zone name to an localtalk network. As I said before, Appletalk phase II packets are now IEEE standard, so that they will not interfere and bog down a mixed enviroment network. Non-macs no longer have to listen to every Mac packet, which was originally considered a broadcast packet to the rest of the world. Appletalk routers still bump the network to deliver RTMP packets about every 10 seconds, but these packets no longer slow down a mixed enviroment network, and have been made smaller in size by eliminating redundancy inthe RTMP information. A final world about Appletalk Internet ROuter. This is a product that can provide network routing, which runs inthe background on a Macintosh, and takes about 150K to itself. It runs on anything, Mac Plus and above, and can simply connect to localtalk networks together (botyh serial ports support Appletalk with this product), or with a Mac II, can handle routing to 6 more Ethertalk or Tokentalk networks for a maximum total of 8 possible networks. It also appears extensible to other types of connections, and will appear to support any Appletalk connection that appears in the Network cdev (we had a copy of Shiva's dialin access which the router recognized, although we haven't tried it yet). It will *not* support DDP/IP routing. This requires a Kinetics fastpath, Cayman Gatorbox, or comparable product. The Mac it runs on need not be dedicated, although if the traffic is high in your workgroup, it is prefered to be dedicated. It can run behind most other things such as mail products and other things. It will run behind Appleshare, although right now it is not recommended because there is a bug in ROuter's statistics printing under Appleshare. If you can deal without printing Router stats, then you'll be fine. Router will cost $395. Any replies, please cc: to me, since I'm not completely up and running on my new system for netnews yet. Thanks. --Rick Ewing Apple Computer Atlanta, GA REWING@APPLE.COM (DO NOT REPLY TO REWING@TRINCC, ITS DAYS ARE NUMBERED!)