Well, I have just finished reconfiguring an aspect of my Network from heck and ran across some points I thought I should share with any would be Apple II networker interested in making the process a little more painless and a little more way retro-cool ;) Specifically, I was setting up a new Apple II server. I had an older Powerwave Mac Clone on the shelf and though, this would do fine as a server. The beast currently had a 2gb hard drive with Mac OS 8.1 loaded. Well! for A2 use this will NEVER do! so... I found a external SCSI case and installed a 1gb drive. I hooked this to the external SCSI port on the Powerwave and slapped the original Power Computing CD in the CD drive. Three finger salute, hold down the C key and in the course of time; a diskutility or two and, the 1gb was now a Mac HFS (not HFS+) format MacOS 7.5.3 drive. Next I downloaded a copy of Appleshare 3.0 (with thanks to all in CSA2 who responded to my request for this obscure software). Configuration of Administrator users, shares, etc then takes place followed by wiring up a 10bT ethernet connection to the proper card AND a phone line dongle for a Localtalk net. Oh yes, Localtalk Bridge extension was also installed Fire up the beast, and fire up my trusty ROM 3. Load Network on the ROM 3 then map to the 1Gig drive and copy over ProDOS and Basic.System. While I was at it I dropped a full SYSTEM folder on the root of 1GIG. You just never know when you might wish to load up a full GS/OS boot from a network. Next I found a copy of sneeze.bsq, unBinscii and unShrinked it on the GS and transferred it over to the root of the 1Gig. Why? well the next piece of hardware requires this and I will explain Sneeze in a moment to those unaware of its wonders: My Apple IIe with Transwarp II, a Liron card, 1mb memory card, RGB-memory daughtercard, and this and that...also has a Apple II workstation card in slot 7. This magic card allows the IIe to boot from a network source and THAT was why the exercise was conducted: I wanted to boot this IIe from the Net. And now that works like a champ. Now, what the heck is "Sneeze"? Sneeze is a file handling utility for ProDOS. It looks acts and behaves like many of the various flavors of Norton Commander clones developed in the *nix world (See Midnight Commander as the best example). Sneeze is navigated using the arrow keys, the tab key and enter. Tab shows you all disks mapped or connected to your IIe. When you press it, the 5.25 and 2.5 drives all blink (or grunt if no disk is inserted). Sneeze will see Basic formated drives, but not Pascal by the way.. By copying the files from the Sneeze disk to the root (or System dir; wherever you have set the ProDOS boot to in the Apple II setup within Appleshare 3.0 or 3.0.3) of the HFS drive, you have in effect said: "Run this on boot". This means the Apple IIe loads Sneeze when it boots and believe me; this app was MADE for network boot! Scanning the content of all directories on a 1 gigabyte HFS drive (or even multiple drives if you have selected them at boot) from a wee Apple IIe is just plain cool. Try it, you too can enjoy the power :) -Bart >I haven't used one of mine yet, but I got 7 of these (I'm working on getting >the //e to go with it, but I'm already netbooting my IIgs from an LCIII - >which actually seems slower than the SE I was using before)... > >Are these cards rare or something? Not that I know of other then the fact that they have not been made in many years and some are probably failing due to bit rot. > >I need to source/make up some of the cables for them, since I have only one >- and since I haven't used it, I'm curious about the printer port. How does >that work? > If interested, go to http://www.syndicomm.com/~pilgrimer/nfh/nfhmaster.htm or just Google "Network from Heck". You will come across some articles on what I have done in this area -Bart Keeper of the Network from Heck On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 23:19:51 -0700, Bart wrote: > Well, I have just finished reconfiguring an aspect of my Network from heck and > ran across some points I thought I should share with any would be Apple II > networker interested in making the process a little more painless and a little > more way retro-cool ;) Hey Bart... Remember me? I'm Mike from Digital Civilization. We ran a copy of your network from heck web page a few years back. We've more or less merged our magazine with Call-A.P.P.L.E. and tried to take it commercial. Although we have fewer readers at least we aren't losing money each month. ;-) Come to think of it we aren't making all that much either :-( Since nobody has heard from the editor in a few months, I'm the guy hunting for content. Would you be interested in the possibility of doing another instalment of your saga for us. ;-) If you want to check out what we are doing to help determine if this is going to be OK with you, here are two websites. http://www.callapple.org http://www.digitalcivilization.ca Since I can't access the storage on the callapple.org site, the current issues are on the digitalcivilization.ca site for free. Later Mike