CompuServe Messages

>can I keep all my SCSI devies on one of the Amigas and still access them >from a PC machine? >100 Gbytes of work stored on Amiga tape drives >FC24 on an Amiga for output It all comes down to what features you really need, how fast you need them to be, how much time you want to spend, and how much money you are willing to spend. If you want to use the Amiga as a server for a PC that will have only limited HD space, you will face problems. There is not good software to do this well. There are technical reasons that it is difficult with standards-based software (like NFS) and there are money reasons that no one has developed a special solution (most people don't need their Amigas to be servers). If you buy enough HD space for your PC, it sounds like you need to transfer mostly large files and you don't necessarily need to do it particularly often or in a particularly convenient way, but you would like it to be moderately fast. If you want to access a tape over the network, pretty much forget it. I use one tape drive to back up all the machines on my network (it reaches out to all the HDs out there), but I don't access the tape from any machine other than the local one. FTP or rcp with Ethernet and TCP/IP on both sides would allow you to transfer individual files fairly easy and could be fast. If you need something like a filesystem, you could use NFS, but NFS servers for the Amiga are tough. You'd want to share an area of the PC's HD and have it be the server. By the way, OS/2 NFS seems great. TwinX with a serial link between the computers would be free and would get you up to about 1M/minute. That might be fast enough for your purposes and budget, I don't know. — Dale L. Larson, Intangible Assets Manufacturing — INTERNET:dale@iam.com