ShareWay IP Professional Edition
User's Guide

Basics

This chapter provides an overview of ShareWay IP Professional's features.

The ShareWay IP Model

The overall model of ShareWay IP Professional is shown below in Figure 1.

Figure 1. ShareWay IP Professional Model

All AFP servers targeted by ShareWay IP are on an AppleTalk network, and all clients are on a TCP/IP network. ShareWay IP is the gateway between the two networks. ShareWay IP Professional associates a unique IP address (and an optional port number) with each targeted AFP server, such that a client on the IP network accesses a particular targeted server through ShareWay IP by using that server's associated IP address.

Limitations

ShareWay IP Pro supports up to 256 servers, and up to 120 concurrent connections, within the following limitations:

• total CPU utilization
• number of IP addresses available (for "multihoming" mode -- see next section)

Note that the performance of the Gateway, and that of the machine it's installed on, is not affected so much by the total number of connections made at a given time, but the total number of active connections. Ten connections which are all doing large file transfers at once will slow the Gateway, and the machine it's running on, more than 100 idle connections will.

IP Addresses

ShareWay IP Pro provides addressing for AFP servers in two ways, depending on the Mac OS version on the ShareWay IP machine:

• Port number only - When ShareWay IP is installed on a Macintosh running OS 8.0 or 7.6.1, or OS 8.1 with no secondary IP addresses, target severs are specified with:
  
  ShareWayIPAddress:PortNumber
  
  where ShareWayIPAddress is the IP address of the Macintosh on which ShareWay IP is installed, and PortNumber is a port number. The combination of IP address and port number uniquely identifies the target server to ShareWay IP.
  
  
• IP address - ShareWay IP also supports a "multihoming" mode with Mac OS 8.1. In this mode, target servers can be specified with unique IP addresses, which requires implementing multiple IP addresses for the ShareWay machine. The details of how this is done are covered in the Multiple IP Addresses Appendix. Once multiple IP addresses are implemented, they are available for use by ShareWay IP.
  
  
• IP address and port number - For further flexibility in specifying a target server, ShareWay IP Professional allows a combination of unique IP address and port number. Unique IP addresses require Mac OS 8.1 or later.

Gateway & Server Activity Displays

ShareWay IP Professional provides real-time activity displays for the Gateway as a whole, and for individual target servers. These displays are covered in detail under Monitoring Gateway & Server Activity in Using ShareWay IP.

Log Files

ShareWay IP Professional has the option of logging significant gateway events, such as starting and stopping the gateway and enabling and disabling target server connections. To use ShareWay's logging feature, open the Gateway Status window. The status of logging (on or off) is displayed in the "Gateway Log" pane. To toggle logging's status, click the "Gateway Log" button. Details of logging are covered in the Log Files section of "Using ShareWay IP."

Exporting to Text

The information presented in several of ShareWay IP's windows can be exported to text files. The Target Servers window can be exported as either plain text or an HTML document. This feature is accessed from the "Export Window..." item in the File menu. Details of this feature are covered in the Exporting to Text section of Using ShareWay IP.

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