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cheesestraws' conquests (cheesequests?)
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2022-07-04 08:27:42 Oh, and here are the drivers, because they seem to be a bit unobtainium.
Posted by: CTB on 2022-07-10 05:47:00 I got hold, finally, of a Cayman GatorBox CS, with its manuals and software (in a rather fetching binder). View attachment 27336 View attachment 27337 You will often find this listed in lists of "LocalTalk bridges", along with things like the little AsantéTalk bridges, but this is a much more powerful device than that. First, it's a full AppleTalk router with an ethernet port and a LocalTalk port. This means that unlike, say, the AsantéTalk, this will actually work on networks with other AppleTalk routers. It will also act as a MacIP gateway, and do the same job of de-encapsulation for IPX and DECnet. So far, so router-y. But this also has a couple of applications (if you paid for them!) specifically to bridge Macs to UNIX networks. It will, for starters, proxy between UNIX lpr printing and AppleTalk printing, making lpr PostScript printers turn up as LaserWriters. It will also, more interestingly, proxy NFS servers to AppleShare! The one I have has both printing and share bridging preinstalled, but even if you got one that hadn't, netopia made the software available for free a little while ago. One further interesting thing is that the configuration is as Mac-like as they could make it. You do not use a command line tool to configure it: instead, there is a configuration tool that works via the network which provides a rather Finder-like view of the GatorBoxes available to be configured: View attachment 27338 When you double-click on one, you get a hierarchical icon-based view of the configuration: View attachment 27339 And individual leaves in the configuration are configured through suspiciously compact mac screen sized dialog boxes: View attachment 27340 Any chance of getting a scan of that manual?
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2022-07-10 05:50:22 Any chance of getting a scan of that manual? I'll check when I get home, but I think it's the same as this one: http://www.applefool.com/se30/files/Gatorbox%20Users%20Guide.pdf
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2022-12-29 11:12:01 Well, I haven't posted any conquests for a while. I haven't really had many, but here's part-conquest part-frankenstein-monster. I present: the RA/UXmount Server. This really has bits in from all over the MLA: the Quadra and the rackmount chassis both originally came via @joshc (separately); it was overclocked by @jessenator with bits from @Paulie, and it has a ZuluSCSI in it. It is, as its awful name suggests, running A/UX, and getting this to run headless was one of the major reasons I built the VNC server for A/UX. It's running AppleShare Pro, as well, from a copy which was made available by @MrFahrenheit. The chassis is a weird thing: to get the machine in you have to take the front off and slide the machine in from the front. This means that the screws that hold the handles on are load-bearing, which I'm sure is fine but still makes me a bit nervous. I don't have rack space to mount this up permanently for the moment, so for the moment it will go in the rack shaped pile instead...
Posted by: CTB on 2022-12-29 12:15:20 Headless A/UX is quite a feat and AppleShare Pro is a tough one also. I use to admin a Q950 running A/UX back in the day that was then replaced with a Network Server 500 with AIX. Being a Mac guy this was a bit weird but it helped me with OS X when it came along.
Posted by: MrFahrenheit on 2022-12-29 12:22:12 Well, I haven't posted any conquests for a while. I haven't really had many, but here's part-conquest part-frankenstein-monster. I present: the RA/UXmount Server. View attachment 50627 This really has bits in from all over the MLA: the Quadra and the rackmount chassis both originally came via @joshc (separately); it was overclocked by @jessenator with bits from @Paulie, and it has a ZuluSCSI in it. It is, as its awful name suggests, running A/UX, and getting this to run headless was one of the major reasons I built the VNC server for A/UX. It's running AppleShare Pro, as well, from a copy which was made available by @MrFahrenheit. View attachment 50629 The chassis is a weird thing: to get the machine in you have to take the front off and slide the machine in from the front. This means that the screws that hold the handles on are load-bearing, which I'm sure is fine but still makes me a bit nervous. I don't have rack space to mount this up permanently for the moment, so for the moment it will go in the rack shaped pile instead... That is really awesome!! Now I see where that VNC for A/UX comes in handy...
Posted by: joshc on 2022-12-29 23:57:26 the Quadra and the rackmount chassis both originally came via @joshc (separately); I'm happy to see this has been repurposed and will get some active use. A tiny bit more back story here... The rackmount chassis came from a lot including a Power Mac 7100 and a bunch of music equipment as it was used by a musician for some period in the 90s/early 2000s. When I picked it up, the 7100 was a battery bomb victim and I couldn't get it going again, so I thought it made most sense to pass this onto an MLA'er who would get some enjoyment from it. It is indeed a weird case - perhaps not the best design but the steel seems to be relatively decent and at least it means you can put a 650-style case Mac into a rack which is just...cool ! I think it's fair to say those cases are hard to find as Macs were not usually rack mounted. It's the only one I've ever seen pop up while I've been collecting since 2003.
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2023-02-09 11:43:56 I am not conquesting much recently, but here's a recent one that's more relevant than it may first appear. This is an Acorn NC in rather beaten-up condition. It's a little ARM pizzabox which has a ROM OS with a web browser in it, and can boot other applications or whole OSes over NFS. My NCs boot into a kind of homemade RISC OS/NCOS hybrid off my NAS, which gives me a desktop from which I can run applications, roughly speaking. (It also has a customised NIC ROM with a more up-to-date IP stack on it, which helps). Here's a screenshot of it: So, what's this doing on an Apple forum? This one was sold and distributed by Xemplar, as you can see from the front panel. Xemplar was a short-lived collaboration between Apple and Acorn to sell stuff into the British education market, presumably in the hope that if you took two companies that had no really functioning strategy to beat Microsoft and got them to work together, a winning strategy might magically appear. It's quite telling that one of the things these were sold to do was be able to dual-boot into a RISC OS desktop to run education software for the RISC OS market and also to boot into a Citrix viewer to do remote terminal sessions onto Windows NT servers. This in itself shows the weakness of their position here: if Apple had had a terminal server that could run multiple MacOS sessions, perhaps this could have been some kind of meaningful interaction, and perhaps Xemplar wouldn't have ended with quite the resounding splat that it did. Though, of course, this can only be a perhaps.
Posted by: Phipli on 2023-02-09 11:52:41 Interesting to see. Can similar stuff be done with Pace set top boxes, or are they too locked down?
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2023-02-09 12:04:24 Interesting to see. Can similar stuff be done with Pace set top boxes, or are they too locked down? You can certainly do it with the Bush STBs, although with the caveat that they don't have Ethernet, only a modem. But they have a debug Zip drive filesystem left in the ROM, so you can boot off that. Rick Murray has a page on it here: https://heyrick.eu/assembler/resources/bushstb.html - this is basically the same thing as I did with the NC to get it into a desktop, but I needed one more module - can't remember which. Once I've got those modules loaded, I just kickstart off a RISC OS 3.6(?) boot sequence (not universal boot) and the result is more or less functional. I haven't done it with any later Pace hardware; would like to get some to play with, though.
Posted by: Phipli on 2023-02-09 12:10:26 You can certainly do it with the Bush STBs, although with the caveat that they don't have Ethernet, only a modem. But they have a debug Zip drive filesystem left in the ROM, so you can boot off that. Rick Murray has a page on it here: https://heyrick.eu/assembler/resources/bushstb.html - this is basically the same thing as I did with the NC to get it into a desktop, but I needed one more module - can't remember which. Once I've got those modules loaded, I just kickstart off a RISC OS 3.6(?) boot sequence (not universal boot) and the result is more or less functional. I haven't done it with any later Pace hardware; would like to get some to play with, though. If you want one I'll find out what we still have back home. We used to have a couple... 15 years ago or so.
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2023-02-09 12:11:11 If you want one I'll find out what we still have back home. We used to have a couple... 15 years ago or so. That would be very kind if you do have a spare. I'd like to have a poke at it and see what can be done!
Posted by: Phipli on 2023-02-09 12:27:46 That would be very kind if you do have a spare. I'd like to have a poke at it and see what can be done! I've put in a search request 🙂
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2023-02-09 12:35:40 Thanks!
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