Networking 2 Macs

[Marc Sira]

> Is there a faster protocol than appletalk to transfer big files between a
> 2400, > and beige G3 via Ethernet? I'm getting around 2 Meg a minute at best.
> Were talking 3 or 4 1 Gig + files that I want to transfer to the 2400 from
> G3 no.1,
> then transfer them back to another G3 at my house. The other part of the
> problem
> is G3 no. 1 does not have firewire, or a burner. I don't do much in the way
> of networking > so be easy on me.

Running AFP over TCP/IP instead of over AppleTalk is considerably faster (even
with an old 68k Duo, let alone a 2400). It's not such a big win when the
serving machine is running OS 9 as compared to OS X because the OS 9
implementation is kind of a hack, but you still might want to give it a try.
If you don't have at least OS 9 on at least one machine you can still do this,
but you'll need additional software (Shareway IP, which is bundled with OS 9
but not free otherwise). See below for my recommendations in this case.

Open the TCP/IP control panel on each computer and create a new configuration
("Local Ethernet" or the like) pointing to the ethernet interface, and with
a manually specified address. Make the address 10.0.0.1 on the machine you
want to run File Sharing on (preferably the faster one), and 10.0.0.2 on the
other. Make the netmask the same on both machines - 255.0.0.0 will work fine.
It doesn't actually matter whether you're running Appletalk or not on the
client machine, though the server will need it on because OS 9's implementation
is really just a shim, with Appletalk running internally on the server machine.
It doesn't have to go over the wire, at least, but it's still pretty slow and
inefficient.

If you have OS X, do the same thing, just using the Network and Sharing panes
of System Preferences instead. OS X actually prefers to use TCP/IP for
everything and will work well without Appletalk enabled at all. The
filesharing performance is much faster than OS 9.

Turn on File Sharing on machine 1 and make sure it's set to allow connections
over TCP/IP. If you're still running Appletalk over the same ethernet, you
can just connect to the server and it should detect that it can reach it via
TCP/IP now (which it will prefer). Otherwise open the Chooser on your second
machine, click on Appleshare, and click on the Server IP button (you can
instead do this step more directly from the Network Browser). Enter the
IP address you gave your first machine, 10.0.0.1. From here it should be
familiar. Once you've got the remote volume mounted you can Get Info from
the Finder and verify that it's mounted via TCP/IP and not Appletalk.

If you're running File Sharing on OS 9 and find the performance increase
unspectacular (due to the issues I mentioned before), consider using something
other than Personal File Sharing. One fairly easy choice is to run a Hotline
server on one machine and the client on the other. There are other choices too
(an FTP server, a web server) but Hotline is fast and easy to set up, and the
client and server software can be downloaded free from the web. You can also
try Personal Web Sharing if you like, but I've found the performance pretty
poor. Finally it should be quite possible to set up one of the newer
peer-to-peer filesharing apps so each machine could see the other (Mactella,
for instance), but it might also require a little work.

Whatever you choose, it will work using the same impromptu IP network you
configured earlier.

-- 
Marc Sira		|	toh at victoria.tc.ca
If you can't play with words, what good are they?