From: tom@wcc.oz.au (Tom Evans)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: Re: Ethernet configuration of Webster Gateways
Date: 1 Sep 92 08:24:56 GMT
Organization: Webster Computer Corp, Melbourne, Australia

In article <1992Aug31.163831.13775@lclark.edu>, don@lclark.edu (Don Weston) writes:
> L&C has several Websters which are behaving strangely.  All basic services
> work, but we are not able to assign zones for the backbone ethernet based
> Macintoshes.  When we go to the control panel and select network, then
> double click on Ethertalk Phase 2, sometimes a complete list of zones comes
> up (but we cannot select any but the Ethernet backbone) or more often just
> the Ethernet backbone shows, even though we have about 15 more zones that
> should register.

You can ONLY put a Mac on EtherTalk into a zone that is in the zone
list of that particular EtherTalk network. That's part of the trouble.

If you want to put a Mac (in your case a file-server) into a
"LocalTalk zone", you have to:

	1. Add that zone to the zone list of the seed AppleTalk
	   Router(s) connected to that EtherTalk network,

	2. Shut down _ALL_ AppleTalk Routers connected to that network,

	3. Leave them _ALL_ off for 10 MINUTES MINIMUM,

	4. Turn them all back on again.

Yes it's horrid and inconvenient, but there's no other way (*). The
easiest way to do this is to phone your electrical authority and ask
them to turn your whole city off and on again. With WANs you have to
ask them to turn the whole country or the planet off :-).

If you don't follow these rules, then different Routers (both
connected to the backbone and everywhere else) will have different and
non-matching zone-lists for that network.

> Things we have tried:
> 
> o	Limiting the network to one Webster configured as Ethernet seed
> 	with Phase 2 
> 
> o	Assigning all zones to the Backbone Ethernet

Which is why some of the Routers have the whole zone list (that you
configured in at one stage) and others have the "EtherTalk-only" zone
list. They'll keep this mess alive until you drop them all.

Which list your Mac gets (and displays) depends on the one it decided
to ask.  By the time you try to select a zone, it will probably send
the request off to a Router with a different list which won't be able
to fulfill the "promise" made by the first one.

> ... I feel like I should be able to tell the Webster about the 15 zones that
> live on the Ethernet backbone without telling the gateway to be a seed.

Set up one AppleTalk router as "seed". All the other ones will learn
from that one, but ONLY during their start-up sequence. Changing the
"seed Router" while the network is "live" DOES NOT update the other
ones - you have to turn them all off, wait, on again. It would be
sensible to have a "zone update protocol", but until Apple writes it,
we can't implement it.

> (Is a no seed network possible?)

Possible, but it won't work. All Routers will wait for ever for each other.

> but would really like to be able to set the active zone of an ethernet based 
> fileserver to any of the localtalk zones.   

Then you have to add all the zones (that you want to put servers in)
to the EtherTalk zone list (in the seed Routers), and then
shut-down, wait, restart them all.

(*) There is an "easier" way, as long as you can reconfigure all your
Routers over the network. Assuming the EtherTalk network is network
number "10", and "9999" is an unused number:

	1. Reconfigure all seed Routers on EtherTalk from having the
	   network number as "10" to having it as "9999", and make
	   the zone-list changes at the same time,

	2. SIMULTANEOUSLY restart all the Routers (this may be hard),

	3. Wait 10 minutes,

	4. Reconfigure all seed Routers back to network number "10",

	5. SIMULTANEOUSLY restart all the Routers again.

The "simultaneous restart" is a bit tricky, especially if you are
going through Router "A" while trying to reset Router "B" - so this is
safer to do from a backbone-connected device. With the MPG's it is
trivial - use "mgccc" running on a Unix host to reset them all.

========================
Tom Evans  tom@wcc.oz.au
Webster Computer Corp P/L, 1270 Ferntree Gully Rd Scoresby, Melbourne 3179
Victoria, Australia 61-3-764-1100  FAX ...764-1179  A.C.N. 004 818 455

wcc@cup.portal.com, AppleLink: "WEBSTER.USA"
2109 O'Toole Avenue, Suite J SAN JOSE CA 95131 - 1303 CALIFORNIA
1-408-954-8054  FAX 1-408-954-1832  AppleLink WEBSTER.USA

Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk