ShareWay IP Professional Edition
User's Guide

How ShareWay IP Works

The ShareWay IP Gateway only implements a very small part of the AppleTalk Filing Protocol (AFP). For the most part, ShareWay IP simply translates the underlying AppleTalk protocols used by most AFP servers into TCP/IP, the protocols used on the Internet. In technical terms, the gateway translates ASP (AppleTalk Session Protocol) over AppleTalk to Apple's Data Stream Interface (DSI) over TCP/IP and vice versa. See Figure 1 below. DSI was introduced with AppleShare IP 5.0. For more information on DSI, refer to AFP 2.2 Specification, Apple Computer.

Like AppleShare IP, ShareWay IP uses TCP port number 548 by default to communicate with AppleShare Client 3.7, although other port numbers can be specified (see Target Server IP Address Dialog in Using ShareWay IP). If your network has a firewall between ShareWay IP and the Internet, and you wish a target server to be accessible from the Internet, remember to allow access through that firewall to the port number that ShareWay IP uses for that server.

Figure 1. How ShareWay IP works

If ShareWay IP and the server are on the same Macintosh, the indicated communication between ShareWay IP and the server over AppleTalk is internal to the machine on which they are installed.

In addition to translating between AppleTalk and TCP/IP protocols, ShareWay IP also mimics other aspects of AFP servers. For instance, if it detects a loss of connectivity with either the client or the server, ShareWay IP will wait two minutes before terminating the session with the other end.

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