AFP Bridge. Hardware AFP bridge
I've always wondered what you meant by this phrasing and calling these things AFP bridges is incorrect and confusing. They are
AppleTalk Bridges. They are bridging AppleTalk from the LocalTalk physical layer to the EtherNet ("EtherTalk") physical layer.\
AppleTalk is a network protocol akin to TCP/IP or IPX. It can ride on multiple physical layers, including ethernet, localtalk, and infrared.
AFP is an application protocol that can be used over AppleTalk as well as LocalTalk. It's nominally possible to do email over LocalTalk (see also PowerTalk) but ASIP6 implies that it's also possible to route POP/IMAP and SMTP over AppleTalk)
And, further, it's possible to use MacIP to encapsulate TCP/IP information within AppleTalk (this is what MacIPGW does, along with some physical routers such as the Shiva FastPath, I believe Cisco might have had some routers that could do this) (it behaves, as my understanding goes, like a VPN, but I might be misunderstanding that possible.). It is, in fact, technically possible to use MacIP for IP communications over ethernet, if you were somehow inclined. (I don't know why, but there might hypothetically be a reason.) It's also possible to use MacIP to talk AppleShare-over-IP over Localtalk. (i.e. my Classic II could do this with 7.5/7.6 + AT/OS updates, if I had MacIPGW or a
In fact, many of the AppleTalk bridges
like the iPrint that you mentioned are explicitly
for non-AFP usage. ("for" in a marketing sense, the point of the iPrint was to connect newer Ethernet-based Macs to older localtalk printers, but older localtalk
macs could come along for the ride as well.)
Cory, I'd be interested in your work with 2003 Server. *quickly checks ebay* ...some pricey stuff there, but can poke around for a disc for $30 bones. I don't have a PC that can run it properly, but it sounds neat. I was actually kind of impressed with Win 2K Server's SFM services. I also never tried OS X Server.
To be honest, I was just gonna steal it. It's over fifteen years old at this point and stopped receiving security patches officially over five years ago. Internet Archive has a pre-activated datacenter edition ISO. The real discovery point will be whether or not a Server 2003 VM can speak the AppleTalk protocol on Hyper-V. MacIPGW and A2Server do this "fine" in VMware and VirtualBox, so just switching over to one of those isn't out of the question, but I already run a virtualization server with Hyper-V, so that would be more convenient for me.
Anyway, I'll poke at that at some point. I've got a CII and the 1400 behind an AppleTalk bridge (helpfully, one of the printer oriented ones, but I know it works fine) and see what I can get going.
I workshopped doing vtools on Windows 2003 mostly to get reliability and something that's easy to administer and supports big volumes.
My experiments so far with OS X Server 10.4 though show that for the purposes of vtools, OS X is fine. It won't speak AFP-over-appletalk but I don't have the tools necessary to pipe appletalk over the Internet anyway.