Adding a Sun to an Appletalk Network

[Greg Economides]

In article <1502 at brchh104.bnr.ca> najem at cs.uiuc.edu (Zeyad Najem) writes:

>We have an Apple lab with 5 machines, a laser writer, and a TECH N50 tape
>drive all connected by Appletalk and served by TOPS (a sun product).
>We're adding a Sun Sparcstation 2 to this lab. I have three questions:
>
>1.  How do we use the appletalk connected LaserWriter for the Sun?
>2.  How can we use the TECH N50 tape drive for Unix backup? 
>3.  Can we use the Sun as a MAC file server?

I have installed TOPS for Sun Workstations (~ $1000 for a site license, I
think) on our two Suns (Sparc 1+ and 4/110).  It works very well.  We can
print from the Suns to either of our two LaserWriters on the AppleTalk
net.  

The workstations can be file servers for the Macs as well.  Although, the
configuration we have (using telephone cable to connect the Macs) can be a
bit slow when mounting ANY filesystem -- whether Sun or another Mac or
from a PC.  But, it works nicely.

You can not use the Macs as a file server for the Sun, however.

I don't know about the TECH tape drive.  I have never used one.  If it is
connected to the Mac, then there should be no problem to backup a
filesystem (Unix) once it has been mounted by the Mac.

Our university already had a site licence for it, so it didn't cost us
anything.

The only glitch was that the install procedure for network printing needs
some work.  I had to spend a bit of time getting the printers to work.
Basically, the TOPS installation script makes some assumptions which I
didn't care for.  But that's just how I am :-)

Peace:
Internet: greg at carnivore.tamu.edu