Xref: utzoo comp.protocols.appletalk:5732 comp.sys.mac.comm:3407 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!mcsun!corton!imag!pierre From: pierre@imag.fr (Pierre LAFORGUE) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk,comp.sys.mac.comm Subject: Re: Gatorbox v Fastpath Message-ID: <20838@imag.imag.fr> Date: 23 Apr 91 16:03:50 GMT References: <63066@bbn.BBN.COM> <1991Mar5.220625.6493@cns.umist.ac.uk> <1991Mar6.142114.27729@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> Sender: news@imag.imag.fr Reply-To: Pierre.Laforgue@imag.fr Followup-To: comp.protocols.appletalk Organization: IMAG Institute, University of Grenoble, France Lines: 66 Nntp-Posting-Host: localhost We are using 18 Kinetics (including 1 KFPS1 -the first in France...) and 2 Gatorbox. All are centrally managed by an Unix atalkad daemon. Our softwares: Eudora, MacIP, etc on the Macintosh, and CAP on Unix systems (CAP-->appleshare server + remote printing in the both ways), KIP and a locally upgraded KIP/gw.srec for the old KFPS. With our experience, I can argue the functionnality of the both are very close (if you do not buy Gatorshare -even if you prefer NFS/Appleshare translation instead of CAP, you have better buy a site licence for the NFS Macintosh client instead of buying Gatorshare). Maybe the Gatorbox has more future. With atalkad, it is somewhat easier to configure a KFPS4 than a Gatorbox -once you understand the meaning of all the flags:-) Kfps as gatorboxes can talk to each other over IP internets. Both are able to assign dynamically addresses to the Macintosh. The support is very very bad for both ... Maybe because we are a non US academic site. For instance, this is a mail sent to Cayman without any answer, about a bug: Date: Fri, 4 Jan 1991 17:06:37 +0100 Subject: Problem with the Gatorbox using IP subnetting We found a problem in the Gatorbox soft, detected when trying to use subnetting (one IP subnet on the Ethernet cable, other IP subnet on the LocalTalk cable). Our solution is rather unelegant, as it implies using an undocumented feature of the Apple's MacTCP, on every Macintosh ... Do you know another solution ? Or maybe a fix in a next release ? The Tcp/Ip tools running on Macintosh (e.g. Telnet, Ftp, Mail, etc) cannot dialog with others IP nodes through the Gator gateway: they register a correct IP address, but they cannot send messages outside the local cable. The cause is the following: - The standard "Ip over Appletalk" software uses the following method to obtain the address of the Appletalk node where to send IP packets with a destination IP address x: - The sending Mac sends a NBPQuery request for "y:IPADDRESS@*" (y is the dotted decimal representation of the address x). There is no concern of local or non-local address, or of net mask. - With K-star, a KFPS gateway has the following behaviour: - If x corresponds to an address which resides on the local LocalTalk cable, the corresponding machine (if there is one) sends a response with its node address. - If x corresponds to an address outside the IP range assigned to the local cable, the gateway responds its node address. Therefore the gateway declares being the correct AppleTalk node for all the traffic leaving the local cable. - But the GatorBox using subnetting does not answer to any NBP IPADDRESS query (except to a query for the gateway address itself). Therefore the Macintosh (e.g. MacTcp) does not know where to send its outgoing traffic. We propose a method to circumvent this problem, by the way of a special configuration of MacTcp on every Macintosh: we set a mask and a gateway address in the MacTcp control panel dialog. These settings are not allowed in the dialog window when the option "server" is selected. In fact we must change the `obtain address' configuration from `server' to `manually', then set the mask and the gateway, then restore the `obtain address' configuration to the correct value, i.e. `server'. Of course such a trick is specific to MacTCP ; we did not found the same way inside non MacTcp softwares, e.g. the old MacIp 3.x and Telnet NCSA V2. Yours truly, Pierre Laforgue (Director of computer resources, IMAG Institute, Grenoble, France).