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AppleTalk and SLIP in 10.6.2 ?!

CJ_Miller

Well-known member
Borkd. I am finally networking my bedroom/studio! About a year ago I ran a single CAT5 from my basement router through the wall to the second floor and connected it to my Vista/10.6.2 i7 box. It has become my everyday box sort of be default but I like to go online with my various computers, and I network them together in one-off, ad-hoc ways. So I set up a gigabit switch here and have been making cables for my room, which has been liberating. Only hitch was that I changed the ip of my router to make my less flexible switch happy, now everything mostly works.

But I have had some rude awakening in Snow Leopard! I had no idea that Apple finally ditched AppleTalk. I guess that itself demonstrates what a lack of uproar it caused... I suspect that the public at large assumes that it is mostly just for old printers... I had set up my 8600 first and then fumbled around with my SL controls to no avail. Funny thing is that just last week I was musing to myself about lack of HFS in SL and asked myself: "I wonder how long before we need something like Netatalk to network with our old Macs!" Guess those days have been here for a while now. Anybody here using Netatalk in OS 10.6? Any tips? Yes, I have been googling but progress has been slow. Once I set up my dedicated file/application server it won't be as big a problem. But for now this is tough.

On other fronts, since my i7 now has a nice PCIe serial card installed, I thought I'd dig out the Arduino I made last year and never did much of anything with. It sounds like OSC support has improved enough that a n00b like myself could use it. So I thought I might connect some sensors and send the UDP packets to Max/MSP via a SLIP connection. So I poke around and slattach no longer works, it too is gone. Again, I am googling about this stuff but it is slow going. I tend to avoid installer packages such as Fink and Darwinports, but if a straight make-install fails because of anything more than missing dependencies, I am lost.

At least now my MDD is back online!

 

CJ_Miller

Well-known member
Poking around a bit more, it appears that there is code, even if this stuff isn't installed:

http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1062/

Recent Darwin builds do have AppleTalk source, and it has been updated since 10.5.8. Still I would be surprised if I could just compile it and run. Probably quite a bit easier is that the tarball "network_cmds" does include slattach, the SLIP command.

It will need to wait for next weekend, time for bed!

 
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