#How do I build a LAN?
2 messages in this thread
Feeling a desperate need for speed, I plan to buy a Pentium to complement my 2
Amigas. Here's the question: HOW DO I NETWORK THESE COMPUTERS? I know I need
an Ethernet card in each machine. The bit I'm not clear on is can I keep all
my SCSI devices on one of the Amigas and still access them from a PC machine?
Does client/server allow the server (the PC) to read and write to the client
drives? Or do file requests have to be initiated from the client machines? I
don't want to shift all my drive space to a PC server for a few reasons,
primarily that I have about 2 years and 100 Gbytes of work stored on Amiga tape
drives (via AmiBack), secondarily that all my animation work will still go thru
a FC24 on an Amiga for output, so I can use a local hard drive for single frame
recording. HELP! I've seen discussions of a couple different Amiga networking
options, but my questions remain. Any ideas? Thanks much for any light
shed… — Jeff Brown, Fire Mist Media (ready to answer your video questions!)
>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