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From: jln@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (John Norstad)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: Re: MacX and Fastpath 4
Message-ID: <937@casbah.acns.nwu.edu>
Date: 8 Nov 90 23:45:20 GMT
Sender: news@casbah.acns.nwu.edu
Organization: Northwestern University
Lines: 24

Thanks to everybody who responded to my query about getting MacX to work 
on a LocalTalk network behind a Fastpath 4.  The problem was that I was 
getting assigned a dynamic IP address which had no entries in our name 
server tables.  That is, my Mac had no name.  Evidently X requires that 
the server have a domain name.  I fixed the problem by simply adding 
entries in our name server tables for all of the ip addresses in the range 
reserved for dynamic assignment to Macs.  I just made up "dummy" names for 
these addresses: e.g., mac157.acns.nwu.edu for address 129.105.113.157, 
and so on.  The UNIX gods here at NU thought this was strange, but there's 
no doubt that this was the problem.

Hope this helps someone else.

By the way, MacX performance on a LocalTalk network with my IIci is not so 
hot, but I expected that.  xterm, xrn, and xedit were sluggish, especially 
when redrawing windows, but they seemed to be usable.  I'd probably get 
pretty annoyed if I was stuck using it this way all day though.  
Performance when I use my Cabletron twisted-pair Ethernet card seems to be 
pretty good. 

John Norstad
Academic Computing and Network Services
Northwestern University
jln@casbah.acns.nwu.edu