Connecting a Sun to Appletalk

[ted at braggvax.arpa]

Kevin (chan at ee.ucla.edu):
>Is there a way that we can connect a Sun to an Appletalk line so that a
>Macintosh and Sun can share the same Laserwriter?...

There are a couple of ways.  Sun's TOPS will add appletalk protocols to
your kernel and let's you print to a laserwriter on the Appletalk side of
a Kinetics Fastpath Gateway.  (It also provides the moral equivalent of
NFS between the Sun and Macs).  I've tried this, and it works.  Require$:
Tops SW, and Kinetics HW

CAP (Columbia Appletalk Package) and KIP (Kinetics Internet Protocol?) are
free software packages that require no kernel mods.  The idea here is that
all Appletalk packets going over the ethernet to or from the Sun are
encapsulated in UDP packets.  A Kinetics Fastpath (or perhaps a Cayman
Gatorbox) is required to do the en/de capsulation for the Macs.  I haven't
gotten far into this yet, but I believe that SW is provided to let the Sun
pretend to be an Appletalk laserwriter, so that Macs can spool to it (and
its laserwriter) , or to let the Sun print to a laserwriter on the
Appletalk side of the gateway.  SW is also provided to make the Sun into
an Appleshare fileserver (this I have tried successfully).  CAP should run
on any box supporting BSD networking, including Suns, 4.[23] Vaxen, and
A/UX.  If memory serves, CAP5.0 can be FTPed from cunixc.columbia.edu
(128.59.40.130).  Require$: Kinetics or Cayman HW.

Older Fastpaths have to have KIP loaded into them, newer ones come with
something called KSTAR that includes KIP already.  Beware, I found out
that (probably due to a configuration mistake on my part) our Fastpath had
started responding to ARP requests for our Imagen.  Needless to say this
caused problems printing to the Imagen.

I think Kinetics also sells Unix host SW called KSPOOL which does some of
the same stuff as CAP as far as spooling goes.

				Ted Nolan
				ted at braggvax.arpa

PS: Both TOPS and CAP will work if the Mac has it's own ethernet board instead
    of a localtalk port, but for CAP you still need the gateway, for TOPS 
    you don't.