AppleShare via AirTalk between Mac Plus and MacBook Air

[bigmessowires]

I've got my new AirTalk device hooked up to my Mac Plus, and I'm running the LocalTalk-enabled build of Mini vMac, and it's working! Very exciting to see this old machine networking over WiFi. But I'm having some problems I could use some help with:

- When I connect to an AppleShare volume, the option to connect as guest is grayed out. When I started file sharing on the other Mac, there was never an option to enable guest connections, only the network identity and start/stop file sharing. What have I missed? Both machines are running identical System 7.1 setups. Do guest connections require leaving the owner name blank? Now that I've set it, the control panel software tells me I'm not allowed to change it back to blank.

- AppleShare works between the two computers, but it's unusably slow. To open the icon for an AppleShare volume served by the MacBook Air and opened by the Mac Plus, which contained 9 items, it took almost two minutes. To open a small README text file it took five minutes. To unmount an AppleShare (dragging it to the trash) took about 2 minutes. I don't think this is due to the low bandwidth of LocalTalk. Looking at the AirTalk's activity LEDs for UDP and LT, while I'm trying to open a remote file, there are 1-3 seconds of inactivity between each brief blink of LED activity. It's like the device is spending most of its time waiting for something rather than communicating as fast as it can. Shouldn't I expect to see those activity LEDs blinking more or less constantly?

Any idea what's wrong? The FAQ mentions that latency over WiFi is higher compared to “real” LocalTalk and that this noticeably affects things like how quickly folder windows populate. But two minutes to open a window unfortunately isn't really usable. It seems weirdly variable. Opening a window can take several minutes, but in a few instances it opened in about 10 seconds. The progress bar for file copies often doesn't move smoothly - sometimes it goes quickly for a moment, then pauses for a long time. All the equipment is in the same room as my WiFi router, so I don't think this is a signal strength issue. I've not noticed any of the error LEDs lighting on the AirTalk board either.

EDIT: It might be coincidence, but things did seem somewhat better when using Mini vMac (in "all out" speed mode) to access the MacPlus disk, and worse when using the Plus to access the Mini vMac disk.

 

[Iesca]

Apparently, if your modern Mac is connected over WiFi (as opposed to directly connected to the router) the speed slows to a crawl. @cheesestraws knows about this, but last I checked did not know the cause.

 

[bigmessowires]

Hmm. Maybe it depends on your definition of slowing to a crawl? From the AirTalk FAQ at https://www.airtalk.support/faq/

Transferring bulk from Mini vMac to a LocalTalk client on a segment on its own (so just the computer plugged into the dongle), I was getting close to the theoretical maximum throughput for LocalTalk. When both ends of the connection are on WiFi, sustained transfers are good, but latency is noticeably higher compared to “real” LocalTalk, simply because WiFi latency is higher than LocalTalk latency. This noticeably affects things like how quickly folder windows populate, because there’s multiple roundtrips involved in getting that information.

From that, I was expecting it would be somewhat laggy but still usable. Unfortunately I'm seeing multi-minute delays to open a window most of the time. There was no improvement when I swapped a Mac IIci for the Mac Plus.

When a big delay happens, I noticed that the TX leds for LT and UDP both blink roughly every two seconds, but the RX leds do not blink. Finally after a long while, a TX blink will be answered by an RX blink. I would guess that the AppleTalk driver on the Mac Plus is not getting any response to its packets, so it retries every two seconds, and eventually it works.

At the moment I don't have a wired network interface for my Mac running Mini vMac, only WiFi, so I can't test if it's faster with a wired connection.

 

[LaPorta]

- When I connect to an AppleShare volume, the option to connect as guest is grayed out. When I started file sharing on the other Mac, there was never an option to enable guest connections, only the network identity and start/stop file sharing. What have I missed? Both machines are running identical System 7.1 setups. Do guest connections require leaving the owner name blank? Now that I've set it, the control panel software tells me I'm not allowed to change it back to blank.

Regarding the Guest thing, if I recall, you need to enable guests in Users & Groups. You need to open the Guest user, and there should be an option in there to enable guest users.

 

[bigmessowires]

Regarding the Guest thing, if I recall, you need to enable guests in Users & Groups.

Yes that's it! Thank you.

OK I found a wired network adapter. With the MacBook Air on a wired connection, LocalTalk doesn't work in either direction - the computers just don't see each other. But something is happening: when I open the Chooser in Mini vMac on the MacBook, and click on AppleShare, the AirTalk's RX and TX leds for LT and UDP both start blinking. And when I close the Chooser, they stop blinking. So the data is making it through from wired to WiFi at some level, but the computers don't show up as available file servers in the Chooser. Might be a router configuration issue? I'll do some experimenting. Something about zeroconf/mDNS/Bonjour? I don't know enough about networking to understand why it might work from WiFi to WiFi but not from wired to WiFi within the same LAN.

 

[LaPorta]

I have only used the AirTalk to connect real vintage Macs to each other. I think what you are describing is accurate. When I helped beta test the devices, it was only between real machines. We found that one thing that helped was making a network that only was used for this purpose: meaning, having only AirTalks on the network. I think that would be impossible with the miniVmac setup. Also, there were other things that allowed for better speed if I recall, such as the router having "snooping" enabled.

 

[bigmessowires]

My network setup may be more complicated than most. It's an eero mesh network system, configured in bridge mode, with one of the eero modules having a wired connection back to a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X wired router, which connects to the WAN. The EdgeRouter X is the DHCP server and has a lengthy list of configuration options. The eero modules are basically just WiFi access points and there's virtually zero network configuration options available in the eero app. If I need to modify some router/wifi settings related to UDP or some such for AirTalk, I'm unsure if the eero or the EdgeRouter X would be the relevant device.

I'm a bit surprised that WiFi (Mac Plus AirTalk) to wired (MacBook with Mini vMac) doesn't work at all, rather than simply having performance problems. I'm belatedly reading through the orginal AirTalk thread and I haven't seen anyone else mention similar problems.

I can try scrounging up another wireless router and to make an AirTalk-only network for testing purposes, but from a practical standpoint that's not really useful to me. I'm still hoping there's something I can do with my eero + EdgeRouter network to get more acceptable wifi-to-wifi speeds.

 

[bigmessowires]

Found this from @cheesestraws in the other thread from August 2022:

There do seem to be quite a few people complaining about Eero multicast not working properly, and you may be being bitten by that.

Netgear's Orbi wireless system seems not to pass multicast properly, and it looks like something similar is going on with eero.

So there's that. Based on other reading, I think my use of "all out" speed in Mini vMac might also be a problem... I'll try changing it to 1x.

I've yet to try connecting between two real Macs with AirTalks, so I'll do that next.

 

[LaPorta]

I can try scrounging up another wireless router and to make an AirTalk-only network for testing purposes, but from a practical standpoint that's not really useful to me. I'm still hoping there's something I can do with my eero + EdgeRouter network to get more acceptable wifi-to-wifi speeds.

My network is an all-extended AirPort network. The way I got decent speed was as your stated: I got a small AirPort Express, designated it as AirTalk only, created a separate wireless network, and then attached that to my home network using another AirTalk with an AirPrint adapter. That way, the entire real network is seen as just another AirTalk node.

 

[bigmessowires]

Changing Mini vMac to 1X speed didn't make any difference, and interacting with the remote server was still glacially slow. Then I set aside Mini vMac and tried two Macs (Plus and IIci) each with their own AirTalk:

Opening a folder on the AppleShare volume: 35 seconds. It was still stuck in this mode where the TX leds blink every couple of seconds, but there's nothing on RX for a loooong time.

Copy 252 KB file: it took 2:43 before the copy even started, then an additional 2:26 for it to finish, total time 5:09. That's roughly 6 Kbps. That's about 1/10th to 1/20th the speeds reported by other users.

--

Then I grabbed an old AirPort Extreme and set up a new wireless network, and enabled IGMP snooping in the options. I then reset the AirTalks to connect to this wifi network instead of my regular home network with the eero. This was tons more responsive: opening a folder on an AppleShare volume took 3 seconds and copying a 252 KB file took 53 seconds, a transfer rate of about 38 Kbps. That's somewhat slower than speeds reported by others, but not dramatically so. Maybe the Plus is the bottleneck, or its emulated HD20 disk. From watching the activity LEDs I think that's likely it.

Finally I tried MacPlus to MacBook/MinivMac over the new AirTalk-specific wifi network. Time to open a remote folder was 4 seconds and time to copy 252 KB was 1:13, 28 Kbps. Several times it did the thing where TX leds were blinking every couple of seconds but nothing was coming back on RX for an extended period of time.

Obviously the new wifi network helped a lot. I'd be curious to know if the main difference was due to eero incompatibility, or due to enabling IGMP snooping, or just because there are no devices except AirTalks on the new wifi network.

--

Hmm, guest logins still don't work. I've edited the Guest user and enabled the file sharing option for "allow guest to connect", then stopped and restarted file sharing, and also tried rebooting. But when I connect to the server from the other computer's Chooser, it still shows the Guest option as grayed out and forces me to connect as a registered user. Is there anything else I could be missing?

 

[Phipli]

This was tons more responsive: opening a folder on an AppleShare volume took 3 seconds and copying a 252 KB file took 53 seconds, a transfer rate of about 38 Kbps. That's somewhat slower than speeds reported by others, but not dramatically so. Maybe the Plus is the bottleneck, or its emulated HD20 disk. From watching the activity LEDs I think that's likely it.

Did you set the WiFi to be on a uncongested channel? Contention generally will slow it down. LocalTalk is designed for low latency copper cable and there is a huge amount back and forth, so it is constantly calling and responding (unlike modern networking that streams blocks of data without waiting for an answer). A small delay has a hugely disproportionate impact.

 

[Phipli]

Is there anything else I could be missing

Have you set the permissions on the actual Hard disk?

 

[bigmessowires]

and then attached that to my home network using another AirTalk with an AirPrint adapter

I was lost by this last piece... what was the point of this connection? If all the AirTalks are on a separate wifi then why connect that to the main network?

 

[bigmessowires]

Have you set the permissions on the actual Hard disk?

Thanks, that fixed it.

 

[cheesestraws]

wrt eero: someone did say on here that eero didn't work, and there seems to be quite a number of people complaining on other bits of the Internet that multicast media streaming doesn't work on eero either. Since AirTalk uses IP multicast, this would also stop AirTalk working properly. I'm somewhat sad that two prominent vendors are shipping newly-made WiFi access points with broken multicast in 2023 - and even slightly surprised, but it seems they are.

Your speeds still sound rather slower than I'd expect even on the new AP: are you in a very WiFi-dense area? Multicast packets tend not to be treated as very high priority, and if your WiFi AP is fighting for spectrum, it might cause it...

(Apologies for my slow response to this thread, work is currently being awful)

 

[LaPorta]

I was lost by this last piece... what was the point of this connection? If all the AirTalks are on a separate wifi then why connect that to the main network?

Sorry for the confusion. It was my attempt to have the best of both worlds: have the old machines that needed AirTalk to use it at decent speed and have connectivity to my main network to access Macs that use ethernet, my Mini G4 classic Mac fileserver, etc. So, I set up a dedicated AirPort for only the AirTalks to use. Then, I connected one AirTalk to the iPrint adapter (to allow Serial/PhoneNet to Ethernet translation) to in effect make the entire regular network just one node on the AirTalk network. This way, I could access anything using Ethernet-based AppleTalk on my main network with the other AirTalk machines without the slowdown penalty.

 

[bigmessowires]

@cheesestraws no need to apologize as it's not your job to play tech support for everybody. Yes I am in a fairly WiFi-dense area, but I think the bigger problem was running a Mac Plus with a Floppy Emu HD20 as its primary disk drive. I'll try again later with a faster computer and disk.

Yeah, I'm sad about the eero too. It's a nice system and it has worked well for solving my family's problems with wifi dropouts, but it's definitely not a power-user product and has virtually no configuration options aside from wireless network name and password.

I need to return the Airport Extreme to its original purpose, so I'll probably look for a cheap old wifi router somebody's throwing away and configure it as an AirTalk-only network.

@LaPorta thanks for the diagram. I hadn't considered how useful an Ethernet to LocalTalk adapter could be. Obviously my knowledge of classic Mac networking is weak. I probably need to pick one up. Got any recommendations?

Wired ethernet is nice for the Macs that support it, but for me personally I'm constantly setting up Macs, moving them around, rebuilding them, then packing them away. Nothing stays put for very long. A small plug-in wifi dongle like AirTalk works well for this scenario, where wired ethernet probably would not.

 

[LaPorta]

Currently, those adapters are (to my knowledge) like FW to SCSI adapters: ridiculously priced on eBay for no reason. I’ve been waiting for someone here to get the bug to reverse engineer one…but so far no luck. The iPrint I have works very well: seamless, no software. Had it since about ‘98 so it has lasted.

 

[Iesca]

Seconding LaPorta. People have decided that Ethernet/LocalTalk bridges are valuable, and the prices have shot up to close to or even greater than $100. That said, through patience, I managed to get a Farallon iPrint for a reasonable price, so it is possible.

 

[bigmessowires]

-