Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!usc!apple!agate!shelby!morrow.stanford.edu!fizzle.stanford.edu!alee From: alee@fizzle.stanford.edu (Andrew Lee) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk Subject: Re: Telnet on a PC with AppleShare/Localtalk board Message-ID: Date: 27 Oct 90 07:30:00 GMT References: <26293.27246dd0@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> Sender: news@morrow.stanford.edu (UNIX News Service) Organization: Data Center, Stanford University, California, USA Lines: 64 Here's my own tale of woe with using LocalTalk on a PC. If anybody can help out, please mail replies to alee@portia.stanford.edu, because this machine will be down for the next week. I have a 25 MHz 386 machine with 64K SRAM cache, a Phoenix BIOS, Trident 8800 chipset VGA card, and a DTC RLL controller. I've been trying to use LocalTalk boards with Stanford's SU PCIP and Wollongong's Win/TCP. This is what happens: With an Apple Localtalk card, I can't seem to run at 25 MHz. I've tried the new drivers from Apple, LSL LTALKP ATALK COMPAT and LTALKP can't initialize the card when my machine is at 25 MHz, and if I switch to 25 Mhz after loading it, it soon hangs my machine so I have to shut off the power. So I have to run at 8 MHz, which really sucks, because my machine can no longer handle the 1:1 interleave on the hard drive, and takes 26 revolutions to read a track. However, everything seems to work fine with both SU PCIP and Win/TCP PROVIDED my machine is at 8 MHz. I've also tried LTALK, the interrupt driven version of LTALKP, and it doesn't work under any circumstances. (I tried it a while ago, and don't remember whether it hung my machine or not.) Then I tried the old Apple driver, ATALK.EXE. It won't initialize at 25 MHz, but it doesn't seem to hang the machine if I switch back after it's loaded, although I can't use the network. At least I don't have to unload to switch speeds. It doesn't work with SU PCIP, and works very badly with Win/TCP: it takes minutes to do ANYTHING, including accept a single character typed in. Then I tried 2 TOPS Flashcards. I've tried both the old ATALK.SYS driver, and the new ALAP.EXE and PSTACK.EXE drivers, although not as extensively as ATALK.SYS. ATALK.SYS doesn't seem to care about the CPU speed; it works at either 25 or 8 MHz under any circumstances. However, it doesn't work when I have HIMEM.SYS, the version that came with my Windows 3.0, loaded. What happens is that neither SU PCIP nor Win/TCP can initialize the card. If I remember correctly, when I tried the new TSR .EXE drivers, they couldn't initialize the card under any circumstances. Anyway, with ATALK.SYS, they could initialize the card without HIMEM.SYS loaded. Unfortunately, when either SU PCIP or Win/TCP tried to find the "gateway", it couldn't. It seems that they couldn't contact the Kinetics box at the other end of the wire. There's a Farallon StarController, and 1064 plus tens of feet of twisted pair, plus about 30 feet of modular extension cable (flat wire) between the StarController and my machine, with nothing else attached in between. The people in charge of the network here said that the TOPS cards seem to much more sensitive to cable lengths than any other Localtalk devices. They couldn't even get them to work at all locations within their building. So, I'd like some help on either: (1) Getting drivers for the Apple card that will work at 25 MHz, or (2) Getting drivers for the TOPS cards that will work with HIMEM.SYS AND finding a way to solve the problem with the TOPS cards not being able to find the StarController and Kinetics box. By the way, I'm sure that my machine doesn't run its AT bus at 25 MHz! Everything but the Apple card seems to work in it. Andrew Lee alee@portia.stanford.edu