AppleShare, X windows, NeWS, Mac disk server response

[John Gilmore]

garrett at udel.EDU (Joel Garrett) wrote:
> Is anyone working on an AppleShare server for A/UX?  How about X-Windows?

If AppleShare has anything to do with AppleTalk (now renamed LocalTalk),
probably nothing will happen until Apple releases A/UX support for LocalTalk.
You can't even hook up a LaserWriter with it.

Apple has an internal X10 that they demo but won't ship.  They are
"working on" X11.  You can get an A/UX port of Sun's NeWS window system
from us (MacNews); the first release just came out.

> Would a beefed-out II make a decent NFS server for a lab of IIs, or would
> something like a Sun-server be a better idea?

No, a Mac-II makes a poor disk server, for two reasons that I know of:

 * Its Ethernet card can't handle 8 back-to-back packets.  How do I know?
I hooked up my Sun to access the Mac's disk (we have a 300MB Jasmine Wren-IV
drive which we copied the A/UX disk onto, then diddled the partition maps).
Writing a file from the Sun to the Mac hangs unless you specify a small
write size (wsize=1k) in the "mount" command on the Sun.  If you don't,
it tries to write 8K to the Mac as a burst of 8 1K packets.  The Mac drops
some of these, the Sun retries, the Mac drops them, and they do that for a
long time.  It might work as a Mac serving a Mac, but won't work with
any machine which has a modern Ethernet interface and a fast CPU.

 * A/UX has a System V filesystem.  Not only does this give you brain damaged
14 character file names, but it means that files are allocated all over the
disk, requiring a lot of seeking to get them back.  One-word summary: slow.

In summary, even if you are a big Mac fan, get a Sun or Pyramid or Sequent
or something as your disk server.
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