eraser
Well-known member
I need some advice from the A/UX masters. I've found an awesome use for my WGS95 and A/UX ... as a fileserver and bridge machine for my the classic Mac network I am finally building out. I do have a few questions though.
The old Macs will be on a LocalTalk network (ranging from PhoneNet to "EtherTalk" depending on the Mac). The modern network is wireless and the storage is on a Linux NAS with everything mounted as NFS. I plan for the WGS95 to mount NFS shares from the Linux NAS and then share them with the old Macs using AppleTalk Pro.
Question 1: The WGS95 has 10Mbps networking built-in. For old Macs that's not a big deal (and PhoneNet will never even get close to that) but for later era PowerMacs that is a bit slow. Are there any 100Mbit Nubus cards that A/UX supports? I certainly wouldn't expect the WGS95 to be able to push a full 100Mbps but it would be a nice boost from 10Mbps.
Question 2: If 100 Mbps isn't an option I am considering using 2 NICs: NIC 1 will be initialized as TCP/IP and mount the NFS share and NIC 2 will be used for AppleShare Pro and be exclusively AppleTalk. That way when an old Mac either reads from or writes to an NFS mounted share there would be a full 10 Mbps instead of a single NIC trying to do both, which would really cut throughput. Are there any problems with this approach? Which cards are supported?
Question 3: I have an ImageWriter II with the AppleTalk module. I already have a Cayman box (not set up yet) that will bridge the LocalTalk network with ethernet. Should I just leave the ImageWriter II as a node on the LocalTalk network or should I share it out using AppleShare Pro? What are the pros/cons?
Any other ideas or suggestions? I have been waiting for a while to build this network because I am tired of using Zip drives and etc to move data. I am also excited that I will have a good use for the WGS95 and A/UX to get to do what it was designed to do. :quadra:
The old Macs will be on a LocalTalk network (ranging from PhoneNet to "EtherTalk" depending on the Mac). The modern network is wireless and the storage is on a Linux NAS with everything mounted as NFS. I plan for the WGS95 to mount NFS shares from the Linux NAS and then share them with the old Macs using AppleTalk Pro.
Question 1: The WGS95 has 10Mbps networking built-in. For old Macs that's not a big deal (and PhoneNet will never even get close to that) but for later era PowerMacs that is a bit slow. Are there any 100Mbit Nubus cards that A/UX supports? I certainly wouldn't expect the WGS95 to be able to push a full 100Mbps but it would be a nice boost from 10Mbps.
Question 2: If 100 Mbps isn't an option I am considering using 2 NICs: NIC 1 will be initialized as TCP/IP and mount the NFS share and NIC 2 will be used for AppleShare Pro and be exclusively AppleTalk. That way when an old Mac either reads from or writes to an NFS mounted share there would be a full 10 Mbps instead of a single NIC trying to do both, which would really cut throughput. Are there any problems with this approach? Which cards are supported?
Question 3: I have an ImageWriter II with the AppleTalk module. I already have a Cayman box (not set up yet) that will bridge the LocalTalk network with ethernet. Should I just leave the ImageWriter II as a node on the LocalTalk network or should I share it out using AppleShare Pro? What are the pros/cons?
Any other ideas or suggestions? I have been waiting for a while to build this network because I am tired of using Zip drives and etc to move data. I am also excited that I will have a good use for the WGS95 and A/UX to get to do what it was designed to do. :quadra: