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- Path: sparky!uunet!munnari.oz.au!wcc!tom
- From: tom@wcc.oz.au (Tom Evans)
- Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
- Subject: Re: Ethernet configuration of Webster Gateways
- Message-ID: <2661@wcc.oz.au>
- Date: 1 Sep 92 08:24:56 GMT
- References: <1992Aug31.163831.13775@lclark.edu>
- Organization: Webster Computer Corp, Melbourne, Australia
- Lines: 100
-
- In article <1992Aug31.163831.13775@lclark.edu>, don@lclark.edu (Don Weston) writes:
- > L&C has several Websters which are behaving strangely. All basic services
- > work, but we are not able to assign zones for the backbone ethernet based
- > Macintoshes. When we go to the control panel and select network, then
- > double click on Ethertalk Phase 2, sometimes a complete list of zones comes
- > up (but we cannot select any but the Ethernet backbone) or more often just
- > the Ethernet backbone shows, even though we have about 15 more zones that
- > should register.
-
- You can ONLY put a Mac on EtherTalk into a zone that is in the zone
- list of that particular EtherTalk network. That's part of the trouble.
-
- If you want to put a Mac (in your case a file-server) into a
- "LocalTalk zone", you have to:
-
- 1. Add that zone to the zone list of the seed AppleTalk
- Router(s) connected to that EtherTalk network,
-
- 2. Shut down _ALL_ AppleTalk Routers connected to that network,
-
- 3. Leave them _ALL_ off for 10 MINUTES MINIMUM,
-
- 4. Turn them all back on again.
-
- Yes it's horrid and inconvenient, but there's no other way (*). The
- easiest way to do this is to phone your electrical authority and ask
- them to turn your whole city off and on again. With WANs you have to
- ask them to turn the whole country or the planet off :-).
-
- If you don't follow these rules, then different Routers (both
- connected to the backbone and everywhere else) will have different and
- non-matching zone-lists for that network.
-
- > Things we have tried:
- >
- > o Limiting the network to one Webster configured as Ethernet seed
- > with Phase 2
- >
- > o Assigning all zones to the Backbone Ethernet
-
- Which is why some of the Routers have the whole zone list (that you
- configured in at one stage) and others have the "EtherTalk-only" zone
- list. They'll keep this mess alive until you drop them all.
-
- Which list your Mac gets (and displays) depends on the one it decided
- to ask. By the time you try to select a zone, it will probably send
- the request off to a Router with a different list which won't be able
- to fulfill the "promise" made by the first one.
-
- > ... I feel like I should be able to tell the Webster about the 15 zones that
- > live on the Ethernet backbone without telling the gateway to be a seed.
-
- Set up one AppleTalk router as "seed". All the other ones will learn
- from that one, but ONLY during their start-up sequence. Changing the
- "seed Router" while the network is "live" DOES NOT update the other
- ones - you have to turn them all off, wait, on again. It would be
- sensible to have a "zone update protocol", but until Apple writes it,
- we can't implement it.
-
- > (Is a no seed network possible?)
-
- Possible, but it won't work. All Routers will wait for ever for each other.
-
- > but would really like to be able to set the active zone of an ethernet based
- > fileserver to any of the localtalk zones.
-
- Then you have to add all the zones (that you want to put servers in)
- to the EtherTalk zone list (in the seed Routers), and then
- shut-down, wait, restart them all.
-
- (*) There is an "easier" way, as long as you can reconfigure all your
- Routers over the network. Assuming the EtherTalk network is network
- number "10", and "9999" is an unused number:
-
- 1. Reconfigure all seed Routers on EtherTalk from having the
- network number as "10" to having it as "9999", and make
- the zone-list changes at the same time,
-
- 2. SIMULTANEOUSLY restart all the Routers (this may be hard),
-
- 3. Wait 10 minutes,
-
- 4. Reconfigure all seed Routers back to network number "10",
-
- 5. SIMULTANEOUSLY restart all the Routers again.
-
- The "simultaneous restart" is a bit tricky, especially if you are
- going through Router "A" while trying to reset Router "B" - so this is
- safer to do from a backbone-connected device. With the MPG's it is
- trivial - use "mgccc" running on a Unix host to reset them all.
-
- ========================
- Tom Evans tom@wcc.oz.au
- Webster Computer Corp P/L, 1270 Ferntree Gully Rd Scoresby, Melbourne 3179
- Victoria, Australia 61-3-764-1100 FAX ...764-1179 A.C.N. 004 818 455
-
- wcc@cup.portal.com, AppleLink: "WEBSTER.USA"
- 2109 O'Toole Avenue, Suite J SAN JOSE CA 95131 - 1303 CALIFORNIA
- 1-408-954-8054 FAX 1-408-954-1832 AppleLink WEBSTER.USA
-
-