SE/30 on the internet: Ethernet vs localtalk

[Johnnya101]

Hi all.

I'm wondering, since Ethernet cards are so expensive. Are they worth the extra money?

How much would a LocalTalk Ethernet bridge entire setup cost?

What works best?

Thanks!

 

[Gorgonops]

Seems like there's been a run on Localtalk bridges on eBay lately, all the ones I turn up in a search that have RJ-45 Ethernet are running around the $40 mark. Here's a BIN of $38 for the particular adapter I use, comes with a PhoneNet dongle and all the cables you need. Of course, with the localtalk setup you need another machine to act as your bridge, which for TCP/IP will need to be a Mac running a piece of software I don't recall off the top of my head or a Linux/BSD box running macipgw, so factor that into your costs.

 

[Johnnya101]

Hmmm... I have a desktop mac in another room but I don't know how nice that would be. Probably cheaper and easier to get an actual card.

Speaking of that, anyone have one for sale? How much is a good price?

 

[Cory5412]

You can run macipgw in a virtual machine, or you can run it on a Raspberry Pi if you've got one of those hanging out, or use a Mac to bridge MacIP/LocalTalk and TCP for "Internet" connectivity.

It really depends on what level of effort you want to put in, and perhaps your budget.

If you can set aside for the Ethernet card, that would be the easier option, but if you can not or if there aren't any availability, setting up MacIPGW or a bridge Mac (even something cheap and small like an LC) might be a good thing to have set up anyway.

If you set up an LC as both an LT/ET bridge and an IP Gateway, you can set up nearly any number nodes on a localtalk network and they will all get the benefits of that system. It could be a nice way to set up a few machines that'll need this access, especially for things where Ethernet is expensive or uncommon. (SE/30, IIsi, PowerBooks.)

 

[mraroid]

I have a color classic and some PCs running linux and windows.  I do have a network card for my color classic.  I can get on the web and surf, but have not figured out how to read my email on the color classic.  I use gmail. 

Any thoughts?

mraroid

 

[Cory5412]

If gmail.com won't work in basic HTML mode on whatever browsers you have handy, there's no other hope, really.

The next best choice is to put alpine on one of your Linux computers and use an SSH client on the CC to connect to the Linux computer and read mail on the CC.

There's also the possibility to set up an internal email server that does not use SSL or other encryption at all, but that might be a lot more effort.

 

[mraroid]

Thank you Cory5412.  I will read up on how to use an SSH client on the CC to connect to the Linux computer and read mail on the CC.  Once I digest that, I might head back and ask a follow up question.  Let me hit the books first.  Thanks!

mraroid

 

[avadondragon]

Actually I'm pretty certain that you can still use the POP/IMAP service of gmail through the old email clients (like Eudora v3, Claris Emailer, Mulberry, etc) that will run on the SE/30.

Gmail setup instructions for: POP and IMAP

Edit: Oh, and to weigh in on the OP's original question I would say for the SE/30 the network card probably is worth the extra money.  The older compact mac's with 68000 CPUs don't see a huge speed difference between just using LocalTalk vs Ethernet but on the SE/30 it is a pretty nice step up.  Also, it greatly reduces the complexity of your setup.  Unless you HAVE multiple old Macs with a newer (but still ancient) Mac with a serial port AND Ethernet to use as a bride you probably shouldn't go the LocalTalk rout.  You CAN just buy a dedicated hardware bridge and set up MacIPgw on a Linux box (maybe a Raspberry-pi) but it will be a much messier and slower setup.

 

[mactjaap]

If you have a LocalTalk Bridge or even the software one, you can use my MacIPpi or MacIPgw VM. Works out of the box. I'm working on a new Linux version (Ubuntu 16.04) with some extra's and this one has full Internet access without reconfiguring your router ( NAT).

Beta for Virtual Box is downloadable on:

http://cdn.macip.net...w-beta-3.00.ova

You need three things to run the gateway:
 
– Virtualisation software, like Virtualbox (https://www.virtualbox.org/)
– The virtual machine with macipgw on it  use the download link to the beta above)
– A LocalTalk bridge. Can be hardware or software. For software solution see:
http://68kmla.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=22036#p214059
 
Create a virtual machine with the downloaded appliance. You can just import the .ova file.
 
Select your Network Bridge Adapter in the network settings and fire it up. It will get an DHCP address from your internet router and will launch macipgw with startup.  It will register itself as IPGATEWAY:172.16.2.1. Give it some minutes to start up. This has to do with the slow start of the AppleTalk daemon.
 
You set your Mac with MacTCP on f.i. IP address 172.16.2.2,  gateway 172.16.2.1 and DNS 8.8.8.8
Start a TCP/IP kind of program like, Fetch, Telnet or a browser and of you go to the Internet! If you look in the Chooser you will find the MacIPgw VM File Server. Log is as user macipgw with password macipgw and you will find lots of abandonware Internet software.
 
You can login with username macipgw and password macipgw if you want to do more…. But it is not necessary. You can become su with the password macipgw. To make it like it was in the old days you can Telnet to the virtual machine. You can do a    nbplkup    to see all the AppleTalk devices in your network.

 

[NJRoadfan]

Its likely that even POP3 and IMAP won't work these days as GMail requires modern SSL/TLS encryption to connect to their servers.

 

[PowerPup]

You should be able to use stunnel for email clients that do not have SSL/TLS encryption. I had success testing several email clients with it: https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/15763-stunnel-emailing-with-oe5-greenmail/

Maybe in a future release of macipgw it can be preinstalled and configured.

 

[mactjaap]

Ok. Point taken. It still in Beta, so I check it out!

 

[mactjaap]

Ok stunnel4 is working. Will be included in future MacIPgw VM and MacIPpi

root@macipgw:~# systemctl stop stunnel4
root@macipgw:~# systemctl start stunnel4
root@macipgw:~# systemctl status stunnel4
● stunnel4.service - LSB: Start or stop stunnel 4.x (TLS tunnel for network daemons)
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/stunnel4; bad; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Sun 2017-01-22 01:34:40 CET; 2s ago
     Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(
  Process: 2797 ExecStop=/etc/init.d/stunnel4 stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 2818 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/stunnel4 start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
    Tasks: 1
   Memory: 736.0K
      CPU: 70ms
   CGroup: /system.slice/stunnel4.service
           └─2836 /usr/bin/stunnel4 /etc/stunnel/stunnel.conf


Jan 22 01:34:40 macipgw systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Start or stop stunnel 4.x (TLS tunnel for network daemons)...
Jan 22 01:34:40 macipgw stunnel[2834]: LOG5[ui]: stunnel 5.39 on i686-pc-linux-gnu platform
Jan 22 01:34:40 macipgw stunnel[2834]: LOG5[ui]: Compiled/running with OpenSSL 1.1.0c  10 Nov 2016
Jan 22 01:34:40 macipgw stunnel[2834]: LOG5[ui]: ThreadingTHREAD SocketsOLL,IPv6,SYSTEMD TLS:ENGINE,FIPS,OCSP,PSK,SNI Auth:LIBWRAP
Jan 22 01:34:40 macipgw stunnel[2834]: LOG5[ui]: Reading configuration from file /etc/stunnel/stunnel.conf
Jan 22 01:34:40 macipgw stunnel[2834]: LOG5[ui]: UTF-8 byte order mark not detected
Jan 22 01:34:40 macipgw stunnel4[2818]: Starting TLS tunnels: /etc/stunnel/stunnel.conf: started (no pid=pidfile specified!)
Jan 22 01:34:40 macipgw systemd[1]: Started LSB: Start or stop stunnel 4.x (TLS tunnel for network daemons).




root@macipgw:~# netstat -ltpn
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:110             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      2836/stunnel4
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:22              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1175/sshd
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:25              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      2836/stunnel4
tcp6       0      0 :::22                   :::*                    LISTEN      1175/sshd

Also simple to install yourself:
 
To install/run STunnel on the Raspi:

install Stunnel: sudo apt-get install stunnel4

to edit stunnel config file (see below): sudo vim /etc/stunnel/stunnel.conf

run Stunnel: sudo stunnel4 /etc/stunnel/stunnel.conf

For Stunnel, here is the simple config file that you will need.

 
[POP]
client=yes
accept = 110
connect =pop.gmail.com:995
[sMTP]
client=yes
accept =25
connect = smtp.gmail.com:465
 
 
 

 
 

And don't forget to put 
 
# Change to one to enable stunnel automatic startup
ENABLED=1
 
in /etc/default/stunnel4
 
then start:
systemctl start stunnel4
 
 
look at its status
systemctl status stunnel4
 
 
and see if its running
 
netstat -ltpn: