Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!linac!uwm.edu!ogicse!plains!cooper@plains.NoDak.edu
From: cooper@plains.NoDak.edu (Jeff Cooper)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Answers to some NeXTstation questions
Message-ID: <6592@plains.NoDak.edu>
Date: 2 Nov 90 21:09:29 GMT
Organization: North Dakota State University, Fargo
Lines: 73

Here's the replies that I got from everyone about the NeXTstation...

1) about booting off a floopy:

   One person said, "No Way in Hell" and another said it might be possible
   but he wasn't sure, and that I should check with my local NeXT rep.

2) about space free on the drives:
  
   with the 105 meg drive there should be about 30-35 megs free, and 
   with a 340 meg drive you should have at least 85 megs free since
   the whole distribution fits on one 256 meg OD.  It was mentioned 
   that a lot of the extra space on the 105 was taken up by the swap
   file.

3) about FTP sites:

   I haven't checked out all these myself, but here are the ones 
   people sent me.  cs.orst.edu seems to be the best one that I
   looked at.

   cs.orst.edu                 general
   sonata.cc.purdue            general  (these two may be the same site
   sonata.purdue.edu           general  but I was given them by two people)
   aeneas.mit.edu              GNU
   princeton.edu               music
   sumex.stanford.edu          Kip
   cs.ubc.ca                   general
   umd5.umd.edu                general
   ftphost.cac.washington.edu  mail
   ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu           Mathematica

4) about 3rd party drives:

   It seems that one should have very little problem adding a 3rd party
   external drive.  You would need a SCSI-I to SCSI-II cable and then
   BuildDisk to figure out the geometry of the drive and format it
   correctly.  I believe that someone is collecting disktab entries
   that people have figured out for various drives (I think he posted
   an announcement to that effect on 11-1-90, but I can't remember who
   it was, so you'll have to check back yourselves)

5) about modems:

   Any external modem should work.  You'll need the proper cable to 
   connect to the serial port, a Mac cable works.  But some people have
   made their own cables from pin-out diagrams.  

6) about SLIP:

   SLIP stands for Serial Line Interface Protocol.  It is a serial line
   connection to some host.  You can do anything that you could do over
   a normal connection (ie run X, ftp, telnet, etc...) but it's limited
   in speed.  It seems to be up in the air whether or not NeXT will be
   supporting SLIP in v2.0.  Some have said no they won't and others
   have said that some people have implemented it anyhow, so I'm not
   sure about it.  There should be more information in the TCP/IP
   documentation (check out a local archive site).

Well that's all the answers that got sent to me, I hope this helps
people out.    

Jeff Cooper
  
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