Cayman GatorBox now redundant? GlobalTalk Connection?

[CTB]

In the days before GlobalTalk I used quite successfully two Cayman GatorBoxes to connect my home office to my man cave a few kilometers away. It was a closed network but worked well. Now with all the GlobalTalk fun I have LC475s and AIR 3.0 connecting the two sites and also to the rest of GlobalTalk. They are the “Vintage Computer Garage” zone and the “VCG Remote” zone.

Both gatorboxes now just sit on a shelf. Could they still be useful and more interestingly could they be made to connect to GlobalTalk?

Has anyone tried to connect them or even know if it is possible?

 

[finkmac]

i don't understand how the existence of AppleTalk Internet Router makes a GatorBox redundant. they both existed at the same time..

 

[cheesestraws]

Well, don't forget you can have multiple routers. If you like your gatorboxes, you could set up AIR just to talk to GlobalTalk and be a non-seed router on a network with one of the gatorboxes or something (I don't know what your topology is like). If you don't really enjoy using your gatorboxes, don't - but I mean, this isn't a *real* network, right, this isn't some kind of enterprise deployment where you have to pay careful attention to requirements. Do what you are going to have fun with - and if you're not having fun, stop doing it. So whether your gatorboxes are redundant or not only really boils down to whether you still *like* them or not.

 

[NJRoadfan]

A GatorBox is still useful as a LocalTalk-to-Ethernet bridge. AIR 3.0 implements a somewhat more complex tunneling protocol to cut down on bandwidth use by RTMP packets and such over the bridge. The GatorBox tunnels were fairly simple, just forwarding any AppleTalk traffic over the tunnel. Bad if you had a large network, but perfectly fine for small networks.

 

[CTB]

i don't understand how the existence of AppleTalk Internet Router makes a GatorBox redundant. they both existed at the same time..

The two functions I used the Gatorboxes for was as a LocalTalk to ethernet bridge and as a tunnel to connect two sites. AIR does the same thing and gives me access to GlobalTalk at the same time so I don't really need the GatorBoxes. I do plan to do some speed testing to see if the Gatorboxes perform any better than AIR running on LC475s.