Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!maytag!watdcsu!psych
From: psych@watdcsu.waterloo.edu (R.Crispin - Psychology)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: TOPS FlashBoxes for the MAC.
Summary: They have major problems.
Keywords: tops, flashbox
Message-ID: <5936@watdcsu.waterloo.edu>
Date: 24 May 89 12:20:31 GMT
Reply-To: psych@watdcsu.waterloo.edu (R.Crispin - Psychology)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 19

I was looking to speed up our Appletalk network so I bought a couple of 
TOPS flashboxes. I wanted to be sure they would not interfer with the
server software etc. I had no problems so I bought one for each mac on
the net. This was a mistake. As soon as I installed them the network
pretty much stopped. A process that took 30 secs. starting taking 30 mins.
or longer. I had a Appletalk guru come over to see if he could figure
out what was going on. After a couple of hours of running some tests 
he concluded that the software (init) that comes with the boxes was
never set up to work properly with a network that has a server. What
really happens is one machine to one machine works fine, two machines trying
to talk to a third machine results in transmission problems. We have
reported this to TOPS and hopefully they will fix it. Currently the system
will only work well if you are using TOPS as a distributed service.

Richard Crispin
Dept. of Psychology             Bitnet: psych@watdcs 
University of Waterloo          Unix  : psych@watdcsu.UWaterloo.ca 
Waterloo, Ont.   Canada   N2L 3G1
(519)885-1211 ext 2879