On Wednesday 24 Jul 2002 6:21 pm, paul wrote:

Hi

Hi,

Where I work we have a room of Apple Mac (performa I think) computers. Afaik We have a mac server, the rest of the site is on WinNT (I think) along with NT work stations, I think the plan is to get the macs to talk to the rest of the network. so they can surf the net or allow the users to save their work to the main server.

This is certainly possible. Disclaimer: I've never had anything to do with Mac's or NT, but I've connected a fair few Win9x boxes in my time. The information here's pretty much just a background for you.

According to one of the technicians (I help him with cabling etc), the TCP/IP can also talk appletalk, I am not sure about this but I have read that it's possible to stick a linux box in between the two systems.As Linux can talk and understand both it can act as a I would guess a translator or whatever the correct term is, allowing both to co-exist, (someone in the US did this a few years ago, I can't seem to find the write up though).

Firstly, TCP/IP can't talk appletalk, or SMB or anything else for that matter. TCP/IP is the network layer - it simply allows two computers to talk. Appletalk, SMB, NFS etc., are all application layer. They sit on top of the network layer and actually provide services like file sharing. Linux can provide resources to other unix boxes; file sharing using NFS; printer sharing using LPR/LPRNG/CUPS. Linux can provide resources to Windows boxes, both file and printer sharing are done using Samba. Linux can provide resources to Mac boxes, both file and printer sharing are done by netatalk. This means that you could create a directory under Linux, and then using NFS make it available to other unix boxes, using Samba make it available to Windows boxes, and using Netatalk make it available to macs. Similarly, you can make a printer available to everyone. Now here's the clever bit (I've not done this but it should work) is that Linux can also use resources from Windows boxes. This means that you could share directories and printers on your NT box and then configure your Linux box to use them. Then you could make them available to the Mac's using Netatalk. In this way, provided the Linux box was up and running, the Mac could print on the NT's printer and access files on the NT's disk.

If it's possible I could have a go, as there seems to be quite a lot of old kit lying around so we could make use of it, as it should not need a super duper computer to do this, just something low powered with a nice amount of ram (for linux anything 16mb + I guess).

It should be certainly possible, but I'd want more than 16mb RAM, especially if you're going for a recent distribution. 2.4 kernels like plenty of memory. Also, bear in mind that if the box is slow, then everything using it will also be slow. Having said that, the bottleneck is almost always the network anyway.

As I said, I not sure about how well TCP/IP and appletalk communicate, Looking through my sams TYS tcp/ip in 24 hrs I can't see any references to appletalk, so it's either not supported or needs some sort of extentions or something.

As I said above, TCP/IP does not know anything about appletalk just like it knows nothing about SMTP, HTTP etc. Having said that, you did also mention above that you want to give the Mac's internet access. How will this involve the Linux box. Presumably, the NT boxes already have internet access and you simply want to extend tha to the Mac's. Surely, that's just a case of configuring the IP stack on the Mac's properly?

Has anyone got any experience of this, I will have a look on the LDP site, and on the net, any advice would be great, I can then propose to one ot the techs about this.

thanks

Paul

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