Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!drew
From: drew@cup.portal.com (Andrew E Wade)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Shiva NetSerial
Message-ID: <24853@cup.portal.com>
Date: 9 Dec 89 17:33:05 GMT
References: <1003@maytag.waterloo.edu>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 20

(My mailer couldn't reach poster, so...)
We've had a netserial with attached external 2400b modem for about a year,
on net with half-dozen or so macs.
For dial-out:  just fine, works, we're happy.
For dial-in net access:  what a neat idea, sometimes works, but flakey.
Sometimes can't get it to work 2400b, and it drops to 1200b, but sw doesn'
t recognize that, so you have to manually reset.  Some things don't work
well or time out, presumably because it's slow.  And, finally, although
the concept is great (dial up and you're connected just as if you were
on the net locally), in practice it is 100x slower (2400b rather than
appletalk 240Kb), so many (most?) things become impractically slow; e.g.,
a print job that might take 30 sec normally, becomes 5 min, which is too
slow for me, anyway.
Speculation:  we've had some crashes that might (caveat:  I'm speculating...)
be related to shiva software, maybe the mods done to the system on init or
the init itself.  I say might be related because mysterious crashes stopped
when we removed shiva software (rebuilt a new system without it).  NOw, it
is unfair to blame shiva, because I don't really know.  Guess I'm curious,
though, if others have seen this or not.
-Drew