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From: jmunkki@hila.hut.fi (Juri Munkki)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Appletalk broadcasting [Re: ROM Disk and other machines?]
Message-ID: <1990Nov13.200801.1173@santra.uucp>
Date: 13 Nov 90 20:08:01 GMT
References: <1990Nov9.032405.13315@cs.utk.edu> <1990Nov9.044036.7385@cs.umn.edu> <7065@hub.ucsb.edu> <1990Nov11.181457.24416@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
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Reply-To: jmunkki@hila.hut.fi (Juri Munkki)
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, FINLAND
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In article <1990Nov11.181457.24416@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> jtt@cunixd.cc.columbia.edu (James T. Tanis) writes:
>Appletalk certainly does implement a broadcast mode. the destination node,
>I believe, is set to 255 on the packet.It is supported at the ATP level,
>and who knows if any existing software implements it.

I have used appletalk broadcasts on the DDP level and it does work, if
you don't mind a few problems. The first problem is that every machine
has to have the DDP listener registered to the same socket. Normally
sockets are allocated dynamically, so there is no way to guarantee that
every machine has the same socket. The solution to this is to pick a
socket from the experimental socket number range and hope that someone
else is not already using it.

The other problem is that broadcasts do not seem to be able to cross
physical bridges. If you have one machine on the other side of a
Kinetics fastpath and the others on the other, broadcast packets will
not be able to cross. There might be a way to fix this, but I can't
remember the specifics well enough to be able to know for sure.

Bottom line: unless you are writing a game or you are at Apple writing
system software, I don't recommend using using broadcasts.

What do broadcasts have to do with ROMdisks?

   ____________________________________________________________________________
  / Juri Munkki	    /  Helsinki University of Technology   /  Wind  / Project /
 / jmunkki@hut.fi  /  Computing Center Macintosh Support  /  Surf  /  STORM  /
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