Thin-Clienting Classic Mac OS?

[paws]

I've got one too which I took the HD out of because it was noise and probably about to fail. I've not used it for a while, but just set it up to boot from ROM.

It does indeed seem to have AppleShare built-in. I didn't try to mount a share and test the speed, as I didn't want to fork up the network settings on my other (ethernet) Macs, but it really makes you wonderwhy Apple didn't include something like this on more models...

 

[Bunsen]

macdan's network access disk for PPC Macs (article) - includes link to 68k version

 

[Charlieman]

Modern PC's can boot using PXE, Unix boxes can boot using bootp. But with PC's just leave that for the installation, unless running some OS designed to be diskless.
Windows is not designed to run diskless.

Not designed =/= Not possible. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 are both officially supported and well documented. Not sure about Windows 95 or 98 -- possible but not supported? Perhaps somebody has a copy of the Resource Kit 3" thick book handy? [Edit: 3Com have some info on how to do it.]

Windows NT 4, 2000 and XP are network bootable using third party software. The PC NIC has to be RIS compliant IIRC and some companies sold boot ROMs for popular NIC adapters. The software was offered to the education and similar markets in Europe several years ago, although it never made much sense to me on an economic basis (network hardware costs more than hard disks). I've also seen remote boot software for PC assemblers that that uses an XP rather than Win PE image for hardware testing.

 

[Charlieman]

Wow. This question triggered some long forgotten memories! I used to work in a student computer lab where we wanted to do just this. We had a mix of LCIII's and (new) PowerMac 6100's. We did in fact get this to work using "The Diskless Mac" from Sonic Systems - which was essentially a boot ROM that replaced the onboard ROM on a PDS or NuBUS (was the 6100 NuBus - I cant remember) ethernet card.

Google "The Diskless Mac" with "Sonic Systems" and you'll see how it works. We did this with System 7, but I have to tell you that we abandoned the idea not too far into it - the problem was when you had 40 machines all reboot at the same time - veeeeeeeery slow. A few machines at a time was fine however, so not likely to be a problem if you can find any of this kit

Sonic TDM always fascinated me but like you, we used RevRdist for patching and cleaning Macs. MacPrefect kept them very clean anyway. IIRC, Sheffield University were quoted as one of the UK adopters of Sonic TDM.

Sonic NICs were always well made and used the same chipset as Apple. They had a socketed EPROM which was swapped out for the TDM version, I believe. Did it require a NetWare server to provide RPL?

 

[Charlieman]

My crazy network experiment is to get a tokenring network setup between some old PCs and some Nubus Macs using Netware 4.11 on an old PC server (which will have TCP/IP via ethernet and a tokenring card).

Caldera had access to NetWare source code and briefly offered a free product called NetWare for Linux. It was a NetWare 4.x clone (I have no idea how well third party NLMs ran) running on a limited number of Linux distros. I experimented with it using RedHat 5.0.

 

[Gil]

My crazy network experiment is to get a tokenring network setup between some old PCs and some Nubus Macs using Netware 4.11 on an old PC server (which will have TCP/IP via ethernet and a tokenring card).

Caldera had access to NetWare source code and briefly offered a free product called NetWare for Linux. It was a NetWare 4.x clone (I have no idea how well third party NLMs ran) running on a limited number of Linux distros. I experimented with it using RedHat 5.0.

Now there's something interesting! During what time frame did this happen? Still available?

 

[Charlieman]

Now there's something interesting! During what time frame did this happen? Still available?

Circa year 2000. I doubt whether it is still available but was issued under a free usage licence (see also DR-DOS 7 from Caldera). I know that I kept a copy but it was stored away yonks ago.

 

[gavo]

Not designed =/= Not possible. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 are both officially supported and well documented. Not sure about Windows 95 or 98 -- possible but not supported? Perhaps somebody has a copy of the Resource Kit 3" thick book handy? [Edit: 3Com have some info on how to do it.]

From memory, Win95 was supported by MS, but support was dropped in Win95 OSR2. Win98 was not supported. We did it with Win95 and Netware (using the VLM redirectors - not the native MS Client for Netware/NDS) - I think I've still got the doco we developed for our solution somewhere about...

 

[gavo]

Did it require a NetWare server to provide RPL?

From memory we did use Netware for RPL, but that may have been because we were already using it for our Windows environment.

I have a vauge recolection that Sonic provided a Mac based app to provide this, but I cant be sure.

 

[Gil]

RPL? :?:

 

[porter]

RPL? :?:

In IBM speak.....

RPL is Remote Program Load.

IPL is Initial Program Load.

 

[Gil]

RPL? :?:

In IBM speak.....

RPL is Remote Program Load.

IPL is Initial Program Load.

... :O

 

[z180]

On DOS I stuffed all wanted programs in a archive, copied that

on the boot disk together with a ramdisk driver

.Perhaps a similarapproach

is possible for repairing (or flashing G3/G4) old macs.I meant stuffing more tools into a floppy than DiskTools 8.x and using a newer system with compression together with a custom decompressor.