[WinMac] OT & OS advice sought

Gary Zak(gzak[at]sd61.bc.ca)
Sun, 16 May 1999 12:19:33 -0700

I am a math teacher who has maintained a lab of 23 Mac 5260's (OS 7.5.1)
for three years using Localtalk. Our school (about 50 NT4 machines and the
MacLab) recently went Ethernet (100Bt on the NT4's and 10Bt on the 5260's)
school-wide and I want to tweak the 5260's to get the best performance out
of them in the new environment. We just got a technician (two days a week
till the end of the school year) who can do all the grunt work for me, but
I need to tell her exactly what I want, and I cannot spend any more money,
since the NT side is going to suck it all up hiring a systems house to get
the Wintel side of the school up and running. I know I can use the NT
server to serve the Macs but I want a self-contained network that I
understand and I can maintain when the budget cuts kill our technical
support. (I am a Macophile, regular classroom Math teacher who has no
interest in learning NT, nor time to do so.)

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Current setup:

Server: Mac Classic with external 1 gig HD running Waterloo MacJanet 3.0
NOS over Localtalk, storing kids' files from Photoshop 4.0 and PageMaker
6.5 and serving "one-of" program files.

Clients: 23 Mac 5260's (100 Mh) running System 7.5.1 with 40 megs RAM and
800 meg HD's. All common-use programs stored on client HD's.

One LaserWriter 360, one Stylewriter 4500, and one HP plotter (with
built-in 10Bt). We have Farallon bridges for connecting the LaserWriter and
the Stylewriter to the Ethernet network.

One standalone PowerMac 6500 with a Farallon EtherMac PCI card.

One desktop G3 (266 Mh, 96 megs RAM, 6 gig HD) with built-in 10Bt card.

One scanner with no network connectivity.
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Upgrading work done so far:

MacLab is wired for 10Bt, each 5260 having a Farallon EtherMac LC Comm I card.

Two 5260's have been upgrade using Apple's website freebie path to 7.5.3,
then 7.5.5 with a Zip drive, and, using Farallon's drivers off their
website, both of these 5260's can see the NT server in the Chooser and the
G3 (on personal file sharing).

Cable Internet into the whole school, Maclab included.

I intend to turn the 6500 into a server running MacJanet 5.0 NOS, and
re-purpose the Mac Classic. The G3 will be used for Yearbook layout etc.
------------------------------------------------
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Questions:

What's the best way to get to 7.5.5 on all machines (the double upgrade off
a Zip drive is painful) or can you suggest a better choice? Is 7.5.5 as far
as Apple's freebies go - unfortunately the latest Netscape Navigators
require minimum 7.6.

The upgrade only gave me the older "Network" control panel. I think I
should have Open Transport with an "Appletalk" control panel. Should I?
I've read that TCP/IP is faster than Appletalk and I would need OT for
TCP/IP would I not? What is the best version of OT that I can use on these
5260's? Is there a better idea?

Would L2 cache cards make much of a difference if I could buy them? They
are about $100CAN ea.

Have I missed anything that would tweak the most performance out of this lab?
------------------------------------------------

TIA

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Gary Zak
Victoria, BC
gzak@sd61.bc.ca

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
                                                    ~ Benjamin Franklin
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