Re: [NTLK] New Appletalk zone has zapped me

From: R Pickett (emerson_at_hayseed.net)
Date: Tue Nov 06 2001 - 22:10:03 EST


On Tue, 2001-11-06 at 18:51, Ken Whitcomb wrote:
> While
> you may have the ability to turn on Appletalk, there's nothing that ITNazis
> hate more than "chatty" Appletalk devices on "their" precious networks. None
> of them have ever been able to define what they mean by "chatty" (although I
> do know, I just like to find out if THEY know what they're talking about,
> invariably just smoke and mirrors to keep the villagers mystified).
> Appletalk is always vilifiled. The fact is that it has many redeeming
> qualities that remain unique to itself. Some members on this list can
> explain it much better than I.

ITNazi here.

"Chatty AppleTalk device" is a redundancy. Apple decided early on that
when you opened your Chooser, network devices had to appear within 5
seconds for UI reasons. Accordingly, since there is no concept of a
browse master or name server in the peer-to-peer AppleTalk world, every
AppleTalk device performs a network broadcast of its name and
capabilities, every 5 seconds or so, to every other machine on its
Ethernet segment.

This makes the whole plug'n'play reputation of AppleTalk viable, and is
a pretty cool feature when you have a small number of machines on a
network segment. Zones were added later, as it started to get really
really cluttered when you had hundreds of devices shouting all over the
network every few seconds. Even with this, though, the whole idea
simply didn't scale up very well, and networks could experience tangible
performance degradation if there was a lot of AppleTalk out there.

All of that being why even Apple has made a big effort to move away from
the low-level AppleTalk stuff and port their filing and printing
protocols to IP. AppleTalk is kept around for compatibility, but it's
basically rightly vilified as too spammy for anything but small
peer-to-peer home/small-office networks.

So. Depending on the flavor of ITNazi you have, they might just reject
AppleTalk out of hand. Or maybe they understand what the issues
originally were, and will let you put one or two devices on their wires.

-- 
R Pickett           The people that once bestowed commands, consulships,
Hayseed Networks    legions, and all else, now meddles no more and longs
emerson_at_hayseed.net eagerly for just two things  --  bread and circuses.

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