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From: anders@penguin (Anders Wallgren)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: Re: Gatorbox vs Fastpath
Keywords: gatorbox fastpath nfs appleshare gateway
Message-ID: <1990Jun6.011927.26372@verity.com>
Date: 6 Jun 90 01:19:27 GMT
References: <1543@swbatl.sbc.com> <1544@swbatl.sbc.com>
Sender: usenet@verity.com (USENET News)
Reply-To: anders@penguin (Anders Wallgren)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Verity, Inc., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 31
In-Reply-To: adams@swbatl.sbc.com (745)

In article <1544@swbatl.sbc.com>, adams@swbatl (745) writes:
>Due to some internal discussion and the preponderance of Gatorboxs around
>here I'm wondering if anyone has interesting comparisons of Gatorboxes and
>the Fastpath?  The consensus here seems to be that the Gatorbox is horrendously
>slow compared to similar boxes, but offers the only Appleshare to NFS
>gateway.  True?; False?; Totlally confused? War stories? Pointers?


I would add a couple of comments to this:

 - The GatorBox is configured with software downloaded from a Mac or a
   Unix TFTP host - I've never had to replace ROM's to upgrade it,
   which we've had to do with our FastPath's.  In general, configuring
   and upgrading the GB's is a joy compared to the FP's.

 - I've never run NFS across a FastPath (has anyone?), so I can't
   really tell you whether it's faster or slower than the GatorBox- it
   seems to me that comparing a FastPath w/Tops to a GatorBox w/out
   NFS but with Tops is the only way to measure relative performance,
   and I haven't seen anyone do that yet.  My GatorBox running NFS is
   fast enough for me, but I don't have any quantitative answers.  I
   wouldn't call it horrendously slow, thought.

 - Early on there were a lot of horror stories about the GatorShare
   software, mostly due to the fact that it was released a bit early
   (probably for revenue reasons...) but the software has matured a
   lot in the last year - I haven't had a single problem with it for a
   long time now - we're really satisfied and have stopped buying
   Fastpaths.

anders