RocketShare Care and Feeding

[eharmon]

A companion to my RocketWare thread, but separating out RocketShare cause it's a whole different beast: RocketWare 2.0 or Betas?

I've finally got a Rocket in my Wombat system to play with, and while probing around I've generated some questions:

• Does anyone have the RocketShare manuals? I can't find any scans, and some of the configuration (particularly around networking) is a bit odd to guess around.
• In lieu of RocketShare manuals, does anyone know how to configure networking? It just doesn't seem to work for me.
• Does anyone know the difference between RocketWare and RocketShare ROM loading? RocketShare loads the ROM via the Rocket Cargo extension. I'll be writing up some details about that soon because it's pretty interesting, but RocketWare doesn't appear to have any equivalent, that I can see. RocketShare (even from 1.0) uses a Quadra 950-based ROM, but RocketWare predates it. At the same time, there's no way an 030 host system's ROM would work on a Rocket, I wouldn't think, so an 040-compatible ROM has to come from somewhere. So do the earlier Rockets have an on-board ROM which is usurped by the RocketShare ROM?
  • To potentially answer that question, does anyone have a ROM dump from a Rocket in RocketWare accelerator mode?
• Does anyone else experience hangs on starting when the disks are loaded onto the desktop when the Rocket boots? It seems intermittent and can usually be cleared up by deleting the RocketLink extension which forces it to be re-installed on Rocket boot. It freezes the entire system. But, very oddly, I think I've determined it happens way more often if I configure high resolution and color depth for the Rocket. So I have three guesses right now for possible causes:
  • There's an incompatibility with the newer disk drivers and the tricks Radius is using.
  • There's an incompatibility between the Rocket and a ZuluSCSI.
  • I've got a NuBus graphics card installed that's not Radius branded (so it's not being detected by QuickColor), so perhaps the huge data traffic of copying the framebuffer over NuBus to the host CPU, and then back over NuBus to the card, is causing bottlenecks that miss a timing deadline somewhere and it hangs?
  • Note I'm running stock clocks here, nothing crazy.

Some notes from the Readmes that make me suspicious of disk driver compatibility:

• IMPORTANT Quadra 840AV ISSUES:
1. The Quadra 840AV will crash with RocketShare in certain configurations. This problem ONLY occurs when
- the 840AV has more than one hard disk drive (internal or external) AND
- the drives have been formatted such that some drives have asynchronous drivers (a new capability supported by the 840AV) and some drives have synchronous drivers.
Apple’s HD SC Setup utility (version 7.2.2 or later) installs both synchronous and asynchronous drivers when a disk drive is formatted. Drives formatted with this utility will use the asynchronous driver when they are connected to an 840AV. Other formatting utilities may be adding this capability as well.

I have identical drivers on every drive, though. And it's not an 840av.

 

[Mk.558]

You're not going to have an easy time with networking on a Rocket for a few reasons:

Accelerators that jump a processor generation (i.e. 68030 -> 68040) are going to have more issues, that's just the way it is

Networking with a Rocket is a tricky affair. The Asante NIC I have is incompatible with mine. The most reliable way to network within a Rocket is to use LocalTalk, with a MacIP server.

I can't speak for anything else, sorry.

 

[eharmon]

Some updates:

- RocketTCP apparently means literally just TCP. I had been testing with MacTCP Ping and ICMP doesn't seem to work...or at least MacTCP Ping doesn't. As an aside, you do not need to install MacTCP. It might even break things. RocketTCP appears to magically proxy between the devices, like user-based networking in an emulator. Compatibility seems...iffy...but I was able to fire up MacLynx and browse around a bit, so it works...very slowly!
- But AppleTalk doesn't. I still can't see anything on my main network through AppleShare, nor does MacPing Pro see anything else on the network, not sure why.
- The hangs somewhat "mysteriously" stopped for me. They seemed to get a little better, and on a hunch I stopped ever allowing the Rocket boot disk to mount on my main OS. No more hangs. I'm not sure why that is, but it seems like a cure if anyone hits this behavior!