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From: cmcmanis@stpeter.Sun.COM (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: How to network amigas
Keywords: Can we yet?
Message-ID: <133672@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 29 Mar 90 20:09:02 GMT
References: <6431@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 47

In article <6431@blake.acs.washington.edu> (Dale Larson) writes:
>I am still (for more than a year) looking for a way to really network several
>amigas and only amigas together.  

What do you mean when you say "network several amigas ... together" ? There
are currently three common uses for network "media". The first is to allow
one system to act as a virtual terminal to another system. Applications
that support this in UNIX are rlogin, telnet, and rsh. The second is to
share resources such as file systems and printers. Again applications that
can do this are NFS and lpd. Thirdly, networks are used to distribute 
computing (which is actually finer grained resource sharing). Available
ways to do this are through remote procedure calls and network based 
interprocess communication. On the Amiga there are different levels of
networking solutions available for different reasons.

o In area "1", remote logins. The Amiga doesn't have a concept of 
  "remote" users or even users in general. So it is pretty much 
  impossible to exactly mimic what multiuser systems do in this area.
  You can use any of the existing network solutions (serial, ethernet)
  to essentially allow remote shell operations. "NewCli < NET:hostname"
  or something. There is no security here and so only a very limited 
  number of people would "buy" this. Your best bet is to either write
  it yourself or convince someone like Matt dillon to write it. (Which
  in fact he has to some extent with dnet/fterm)

o In the area of file sharing. Well, your right the NFS stuff from
  Ameristar only works with an NFS server and there isn't an NFS
  server for the Amiga yet. 

o IPC using networks. Well this has been around for a while. The
  socket library code that you can get for the Ameristar board will
  let you write programs that need to communicate over the network
  and in fact this is what Dale's X11 does. 

>I _really_ need to have a network soon, and to be able to write software
>which utilizes the network.  Unfortunately I can't program any of the real
>systems which I've seen, nor can I program rumors.

*How* do you plan to utilize the network. If you just want to send 
data back and forth between processes get the socket library for the
Ameristar board. 


--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: <none>   Internet: cmcmanis@Eng.Sun.COM
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.
"If it didn't have bones in it, it wouldn't be crunchy now would it?!"