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From: chris@umbc5.umbc.edu (Chris Schanzle)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Solution to the Network/Boot Disk/Font Problem?
Message-ID: <2169@umbc3.UMBC.EDU>
Date: 7 Jul 89 14:40:38 GMT
References: <570@levels.sait.edu.au> <1976@aucs.UUCP> <5065@umd5.umd.edu> <12179@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU>
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<12179@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> dhom@cosmos.acs.calpoly.edu.UUCP (David Hom) writes:
>In article <5065@umd5.umd.edu> zben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston) writes:
>>> We have a Mac network here (using MacJANET) and one of our biggest
>>> problems is having insufficient room on the boot disks we distribute
>>> to put anything more than a small selection of fonts and DAs.
>> 
>>At the MacWorld here in Washington one of the educational users described a
>>scheme where a Suitcase on the boot disk allowed the fonts and DAs to reside
>>on a central server machine.  
>I would love more info on the subject.  Right now,  we are using System 4.2
>as boot disks on our network to save disk space.  It would be great to use
>6.0.3 and have plenty of fonts available for use  :-)
>dhom@cosmos.acs.calpoly.edu

There really is no "scheme" to do this.  We have been using an AppleShare
network with Mac II nodes consisting of only floppy disk drives.  

Summary: make the font files on the file server, boot off the floppy
w/Appleshare and Suitecase resources installed, then load the font
files using Suitcase.  Suitcase will remember which volume the fonts
were loaded from.  For those of you without file servers, I suppose
you could use another floppy disk, or a RAM disk if you have lots of
RAM.

Since I had three seperate font files ("old" laserwriter fonts, NTX
fonts, and a slew of bitmapped fonts) and ran them through Font
Harmony (as a group) to make certain there were no conflicting ID #'s.
Copy them to a publically readable area on the hard disk.

Prepare a floppy disk (with system 6.0.3 :-) without any but the most
basic fonts.  NOTE: If you have one size of a particular font (say,
Geneva) on the system disk, and have (larger) sizes in file to be
loaded with Suitcase, the latter will not be recognized.  So add as
many sizes of Geneva, Monico, and Chicago to the system file on the
boot disk and leave them out of the font files on the file server.
Obviously, put the AppleShare resources into the system file/folder
(using the Installer on one of the 6.0.3 Utilities disk).  Simply
dragging the AppleShare chooser document into the System Folder is not
sufficient! (rtfm...)

Boot with your new floppy (with Suitcase installed) and verify (or
make it so via chooser) that the AppleShare volume is on the desktop.
Go into Suitcase, select Open Files, then simply open the font files
that are residing on the file server.  Suitecase will automatically
remember which volume the font files were loaded from.

>>They had removed a critical resource from the
>>Suitcase file to prevent it from appearing in the Apple menu.  If there is
>>interest I'll dig out my notes and post a reference...
>David

That would be an interesting bit of information to have, but we don't
like removing functionality of a program that we purchased for use in
the lab.  I locked a few resources in Suitcase and set the Protected
bit so users would not be able to modify the default fonts loaded at
boottime and wouldn't be able to copy the Suitecase file to their own
floppies.  

Although I hated doing it, we checked out the mice (to keep them from
escaping) and startup disks to users as they walked in the door and
kept their ID while they had the equipment checked out.  It does have
good side effects tho (easy to track down people and building
statistics on the usage of the lab).

For those of you considering a similar lab, note that we do not have
any hard disks installed in the user's Macs, but they are equipped
with two or four Megs of RAM and two floppy disk drives.  This allows
us to use a ramdisk program to load the system disk into RAM (making
it *faster* to access than a hard disk, albeit longer startup time).
The startup disks can stay LOCKED so the users will not accidently
save their files or otherwise screw up the startup disks -- a DEFINITE
problem in any public lab situtation.  We use the program "Ramdisk+ 2.08"
with Suitcase version 1.2 (DON'T USE VERSIONS 1.2.1 OR 1.2.2 -- they
have problems switch-launching to the Ramdisk on startup).

A problem we have not solved, however, is WordPerfect for the
Macintosh.  It seems that temporary files AND backup files are written
to the system disk (Ramdisk) whether you tell it to or not (version
1.0.1 -- 1.0.2 has destroyed its own files and the files it creates
are sometimes incompatible with 1.0.1 -- even if you use the 4.2
inport/export options!  Beware!).

ARPA   : chris@umbc5.umbc.edu		BITNET : chris@umbc2
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