From: lishka@dxcern.cern.ch (Christopher Lishka)
Subject: Re: ARA no longer bundled with Powerbooks!
Organization: CERN European Lab for Particle Physics
Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1992 12:12:57 GMT

In <D2150050.i2fgha@nan.network-analysis-ltd.co.uk> sw@network-analysis-ltd.co.uk (Sak Wathanasin) writes:


>In article <1992Nov6.105904.25173@dxcern.cern.ch> (comp.sys.mac.comm,comp.sys.mac.system), lishka@dxcern.cern.ch (Christopher Lishka) writes:

>Pardon me? I use it every day on my PB170 7.0.1/tuneup 1.1.1 with no problems.
>I had no problems installing it either. I suggest you look elsewhere for your
>problems. I have installed it on an fx, PB170, IIci. All of them worked first
>time.

"Pardon me?"  I looked "elsewhere" for my problems.  I spent a while
removing extensions one-by-one, then rebooting.  The problem went away
when I either (a) removed the tuneup extension or (b) removed the ARA
extension.  It seems pretty obvious which two were not coexisting.
However, the solution turns out to be simple -- read below.

A person at Apple sent a reply to me explaining the problem (thanks
Tony!).  Apparently, one of the things the tuneup does is to patch
System 7 so that the AppleTalk code is *not* loaded at boot time if
AppleTalk is turned off.  This causes ARA to think something is
misconfigured in AppleTalk, causing an error message, after which ARA
doesn't work (even if AppleTalk is turned on in the chooser after
boot).  The solution is simple: turn on AppleTalk, reboot, and
everything is fine.

However, this does not necessarily explain why the installer crashed
on the MacIIcx during ARA installation.


>> If you need ARA, the price is definitely worth it.  However, it should
>> be considerably more "bug free" than it currently is.

>The only bug I have encountered is a rather minor one: when you clear the
>log file, no further data are written to it unless the log window is open
>when a new connection comes in.

I just re-read the ReadMe files for Tuneup and ARA v1.0.  Neither
mentioned that AppleTalk had to be "on" in the chooser.  I also looked
through the ARA manual again.  It did not mention this either.

What made ARA appear "considerably" buggy to me can easily be
attributed to one or two problems (AppleTalk off and whatever caused
the installer to crash).  With the explanation, I no longer feel ARA
is "considerably" buggy.  However, those were my initial impressions
after spending a couple extra hours simply trying to get the software
installed.

Perhaps some more thorough testing by Apple of ARA with the tuneup
would have brought the "AppleTalk off" problem to light.  The ReadMe
for the tuneup (and ATA) could have been amended to note this problem.
I assume this has been fixed with System 7.1.

So I revise my original conclusion: if you need ARA, the price is
definitely worth it.  It works as advertised and makes AppleTalk
connections to remote machines fairly painless and very possible.
There appear to be few minor problems/bugs, including one with System
7 tuneup that can cause some headaches, but nothing that destroys the
functionality.  After the initial problems with ARA installation, we
have been happy with the product and would recommend it to others who
need the same functionality.

							.oO Chris Oo.




-- 
                                                           Christopher Lishka
 Never drive a car when you're dead...			   PPE Division, CERN
				-- Tom Waits		  lishka@dxcern.cern.ch
							     vxaluw::lishka