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From: wrb@milton.u.washington.edu (William Barker)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT to PC's
Message-ID: <17832@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 6 Mar 91 18:17:04 GMT
References: <27d42480@epsoft.UUCP>
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 39

In article <27d42480@epsoft.UUCP> mark@epsoft.UUCP (Mark Chamberlain) writes:
>Has anyone successfully married a PC to a NeXT? We have a whole bunch of
>PC's, and we're about to take delivery of a whole bunch of NeXTStations.
>It would be great if we could network the whole lot together. I presume
>I need a PC TCP/IP and NFS implementations and all will work..
>
>a) I've heard of various PD packet-drivers etc around, are these
>suitable?
>
>b) Has anyone successfully put a NeXT onto say Netware running TCP/IP or
>on Lan Manager using one of the 3Com DPA stacks?
>
>All insights/ideas gratefully received..
>
>Mark

I'm running "El Sol" brand PC-NFS on some clone PCs, and mounting a variety
of NeXT file systems, both hard and optical disks types, on the PCs without
much trouble.  I'm also in the process of upgrading my PC-based file
server to a Novell 3.x system, and will be linking these PCs to my 
NeXT systems via the Novell LAN Workplace for DOS (Telnet and FTP) and the 
Beam and Whitesides NFS DOS client programs. (Anybody want to buy some used
NFS software??) A Novell server-based NFS package is also in the works, but
it looks expensive.  Too bad Novell didn't choose to include it as part
of 3.x like they did with IP tunneling.

For reference, the Public Domain NCSA Telnet package with the packet 
driver support works well if all you want is Telnet and FTP. 

When the NeXT-based Novell/AFP support comes out (2.1??--any rumors out 
there??), I intend to take a real close look at it.  If it does what it
is rumored to do, it would lend even more support to the case for NeXT.

In the mean time, I think the PCs and the NeXTs will get along fine.  Of
course, now I've got to make it all work.

Bill Barker
Biological Structure
U of Washington