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Asante Mac Con SE Ethernet

I have a mac SE running system 6.0.8 that I've recently installed an Ethernet card in. Trying to get it connected to the internet and not having any luck at all. I've installed the Mac Con SE drivers and MacTCP. The troubleshooter that came on the Mac Con SE driver disk passes Memory Controller and Network Interface Controller tests. I'll attach an image of my MacTCP settings - maybe they are not correct. I also suspect maybe my router just doesn't want to play with MacTCP and am considering puting an old switch between the two. Any suggestions on hardware that may help?

I currently have it plugged into a Linksys wrt54g v8 set up as a wireless bridge using DDW-RT. It's got 4 ports and delivers internet to two of my other less-vintage-but-still-old machines without problems. My SE is the only one having problems regardless of what port/cable I use.

This is my first post but I've lurked and utilized this forum many times to solve problems and get suggestions on software. Any advise would be much appreciated :)

MacTCPsettings.jpg

I also get this little question mark mac icon during boot ever since I installed the Mac Con drivers. I just assumed it means no network is seen. Is that what it means?

NetworkQuestionMark.jpg
 

bcschmidt

Active member
I believe that's the responder icon. I'm about to go to bed, but I'll check on my se tomorrow. I have a farralon ethermac in my machine. I only have 1 dns address set in mine.
 
Ya I have been trying different things there and the picture was taken after a few changes. I started with the first 2 addresses which were my ISP's primary and secondary DNS. The modem's IP (192.168.0.1) was a suggestion from a friend I did not think was going to work. Oh, and what I am doing to test the connection is trying to ping my router with MacTCP Ping.
 

bcschmidt

Active member
Got any browsers? Try macweb 2.0 or mosaic and try loading up frogfind. IIRC I had a similar issue but it just worked when I tried a browser
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
Are you sure that your router/hub will work? I have a Mac Con SE, and it will only play nice with older routers that are not fully auto-negotiate.
 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
Are you sure that your router/hub will work? I have a Mac Con SE, and it will only play nice with older routers that are not fully auto-negotiate.

Agreed, check this.

In fact, generally check layer 2 first. Is the link coming up on the router/switch? Are you seeing activity? If you have other Macs plugged into the Ethernet segment, can you exchange AppleTalk with them?
 

Aeroform

Well-known member
You should be able to set the link speed manually in DD-wrt. Set the port you’re connected to to 10mbit, half duplex and auto neg off and see if that helps. Also check the status lights on both your switch and nic to check that the connection has been established.
 

Aeroform

Well-known member
If you could explain how to do the above, it would help us all.
It’s quite easy*, simply go to the dd-wrt interface and the config page for vlan. Once there untick ”auto negotiate” (this means the nic and switch try to decide speed by themselves), once unticked you can change the other options. For 10mbit half duplex all should be unticked except ”enabled”.

* Not all hardware support this feature and might require other/newer firmware or setting this option through a command prompt.
 

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Thank you for all the tips and advise. I've been messing around all morning trying to access the UI for the router. No dice. It just times out. Can't seem to connect to it via telnet either. It's serving the internet just fine but I can't get into the control panel. Did it's IP change? I don't know why that would be the case and not really sure how to even find out. I have to go to work now so will be giving up for the day.

I do have a G3 Laptop to play with and it does get internet from the router. Not sure how to try to exchange appletalk but figuring that out will be on the list. I don't have a web client on the SE but I do have turbo gopher and it will not connect to floodgap.

I just don't understand why I can't access the routers UI anymore!! A very frustrating morning tomorrow I'll get up earlier so I can have more time to mess around with it. I wonder if I should just factory reset and start over? Seems a bit extreme but IDK What else to do at this point.
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
It’s quite easy*, simply go to the dd-wrt interface and the config page for vlan. Once there untick ”auto negotiate” (this means the nic and switch try to decide speed by themselves), once unticked you can change the other options. For 10mbit half duplex all should be unticked except ”enabled”.

* Not all hardware support this feature and might require other/newer firmware or setting this option through a command prompt.
You have to forgive me ignorance, but my question basically was “what is a dd-wrt, and how do I get to it with various routers?”.
 

mactjaap

Well-known member
If this is all to difficult… Maybe more simpel to use an old switch or even better hub. I have some. Bought them at a thrift store.
 
I've made some progress! Setting the port to half-duplex 10Mbit did the trick. It took a facotry reset to get back into DD-WRT web interface and every time I apply changes to the advance settings it wipes the web interface out. I'm sure there is some "web inerface" checkbox that gets unchecked somehow but that's not what this thread is about so....

Anyway I can ping the client router and I can ping the modem. I can ping google and the floodgap (which is my end goal to connect to). All excellent, but I cannot connect to gopher.floodgap.com using Turbo Gopher. It tries to connect - shows "connecting..." while the little gopher cursor does it's moonwalk but then flashes something too quick for me to read and displays "could not connect". Tried other servers as well with the same result. Any tips on using Turbo Gopher under system 6.0.8?

I got a recommendation to upgrade to system 7 because "..it does internet stuff better" but IME using system 7.5 with a 4MB Mac SE is a painfully slow experience with lots of crashing. I guess there is a system 7.1 which isn't as bad? But I would really like to get this working under 6.0.8 if at all possible. What you all think?
 
Just to close out this thread I thought I would update that I got it working. Pretty sure changing to a patched version of MacTCP (v2.1) is what did the trick. I also deleted and reinstalled the asante drivers too so could have been that or combination of the two. My big take-away is fooling around with old network cards and modern network infrastructure is a very finicky endeavor and is not for the faint of heart. The tips about DD-WRT in this thread and a blog I was linked to from a different thread were very useful. Here's the blog for anyone who is curious: https://www.savagetaylor.com/2020/05/10/macplus-on-my-network-using-scsi-to-ethernet/ Thanks to all for the replies and tips. Cheers!

PS. Here's a pic of my SE getting news headlines from floodfeeds :)
MacOnTheNet.jpg
 

just.in.time

Well-known member
Awesome to see that you got it working! I use that same network card on my Mac SE FDHD with 4MB RAM and System 7.1. Initial MacTCP configuration definitely gave me a huge appreciation for OpenTransport on later systems.

One thing to note (I didn’t see it mentioned yet) is to make sure you tell your router to assign a static IP address to the SE Ethernet card’s MAC address. Then anytime it connects, router reboots, etc. it will always give your SE the same IP address and you won’t have to manually update settings in MacTCP if/when it changes. Makes life a little more simple.

Also, bit of a tangent, but if you install NetPresents (spelling?) on the SE you can run an FTP server from it and push files to it from any modern computer. Makes adding software significantly easier.
 
I have FTPShare loaded on my G3 Powerbook and Fetch FTP on the SE. So I've been loading software on the powerbook and pulling them off with Fetch. I never considered making the SE the server that sounds like a good approach too.

As for the IP - from what I understand MacTCP doesn't get it's IP address from the router. My router uses X.X.X.100 - X.X.X.199 for DHCP so I just set up an IP smaller than X.X.X.100 in MacTCP and so far that seems to be working.

Lastly I decided it would be fun to do the whole process over again using my SE FDHD and setting up with system 7.0.1 instead of 6.0.8. My last project on that machine was to see what system 7.5 ran like on it and man was it slow! Wiping it clean and trying 7.0.1 sounded like the right thing to do so I swapped the Ethernet card out the SE and in the SE FDHD and started with a clean install of 7.0.1 and all the network utilities. Gave me a chance to verify that it was indeed the MacTCP 2.0.6 -> MacTCP 2.1 patch that got everything working fully. Apparently there is some issue MacTCP has with some ISP's that the 2.1 patch corrects. It's referred to on this guide but the link to the university of Oregon's explanation is broken :(.

My next adventure will be trying out Localtalk Bridge and adding the first SE back into the mix via Localtalk. I know this is not a way to share internet but would work for moving files around.
 

just.in.time

Well-known member
Definitely makes for a cool project. Agreed on 7.5.x feeling slow on the SE. System 7.0.1/7.1, in my opinion, seems to strike a good balance of features, performance and compatibility.

The only reason I made the SE the FTP host is because that’s the only way I could get it to talk correctly with a modern MacBook. Trying to make the SE the client and the MacBook the host was causing issues. I think it was the modern computer wanting to enforce SFTP host instead of the insecure FTP host, and the SE not being compatible with SFTP. However, the MacBook will still connect to an insecure host just fine. There may be a workaround though, not sure.
 
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