Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!ucbvax!pasteur!ames!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!phri!roy
From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Kinetics FastPath box & CAP
Keywords: FastPath, Kinetics, CAP
Message-ID: <3271@phri.UUCP>
Date: 16 May 88 13:54:49 GMT
References: <11259@sunybcs.UUCP>
Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY)
Lines: 33


	We've been running KIP/CAP for about a year now.  We've got a
4.3BSD Vax driving 2 LaserWriters on a PhoneNet network spanning 4 floors
with about a dozen Macs in addition to the LWs.  We've also got 2 LWs
driven by RS-232 from Sun-3s.  The Vax, Suns, and kbox are all on an
ethernet.

	Anyway, CAP seems to work about 90% as well as we'd like.  The
biggest problem is a niggling bug which sometimes causes the LWs to hang
when a print job starts.  Curiously, one of our LWs hangs a lot more often
than the other, and even more curiously, the one which hangs more
frequently is about the furthest node on the net (the other LW sits right
next to the kbox).  Charlie Kim at Columbia has been very helpful trying to
figure out what might be wrong and supply fixes.  We're running CAP release
4, with many patches applied.  I understand that CAP release 5 will be out
soon, and we're eagerly awaiting that, in the expectation that the LW hang
bug will finally go away for good.  We never did get lwsrv (the Unix-side
LaserWriter print spooler) to work, but since it's not really needed in our
environment, we don't miss it.  We've also never experimented with the
other half of CAP, which is AppleShare support (lets you use your unix box
as an AppleShare server).  Bottom line is we probably print several hundred
pages a day using CAP and don't see the need to pay money for a commercial
product to replace it.

	We also use NCSA Telnet, which includes ftp support, on our Macs so
we can do remote logins to our Unix boxes.  NCSA Telnet is a very nice
program.  We've found a few very minor bugs in it, most of which will
probably be fixed in some later version.
-- 
Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net