Re: [NTLK] New Appletalk zone has zapped me

From: Eric L. Strobel (fyzycyst_at_home.com)
Date: Wed Nov 07 2001 - 09:23:00 EST


at the temporal coordinates: 11/6/01 10:10 PM, the entity known as R Pickett
at emerson_at_hayseed.net conveyed the following:

> 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.

Thanks for the explanation. Question, though... It seems to me that, given
the bandwidth of even 10BT, every five seconds is an eternity. I guess I've
never understood why this was a problem. We're talking, what, a few
THOUSANDTHS of a percent of the bandwidth per machine pair? Maybe I've
never worked anyplace big enough to have a problem (I realize the traffic is
going to go like N^2 IF every Mac has file-sharing on, otherwise isn't it
just # AppleTalk printers X # Macs?). How does this compare with the
problem that print spoolers cause? (You know, sending those 20 MB
Powerpoint files over the network TWICE, once to the spooler, then from
spooler to printer.)

Not that it matters nowadays. In an era of hard drives in the 10's of GB,
is there even a use for the traditional centralized file server? Maybe once
every 4-6 months do I mount one of the network volumes, when someone has a
file too big to transfer by e-mail. At that level of usage, I could turn on
an FTP server on my machine for a few minutes, or just walk down the hall w/
a Zip disk.

{I suppose this is wandering OT... I'll shut up now.}

- Eric.

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