home networking seems a mess

[tomem]

Since the public beta, I've had a lot of trouble with AppleTalk using OS X and OS 9 machines, at work and at home.

At home, I'm running a 6500, two early iMacs, a new iMac, and a g4 Powerbook (when I'm home) on an ethernet hub, with an ADSL modem to Earthlink. All machines are running OS X, except the 6500. I run IPNetRouter on the 6500, allowing all the machines to use the DSL for internet access. Each machine has a location switch so it can either use the router or connect directly to the DSL modem if the router isn't responding. They all work well in either mode for internet access.

The problem is with the machines talking to each other using AppleTalk sharing. No matter what I do, some machines are invisible, and some are visible but won't share, while others work perfectly. All of this seems intermittent, though I haven't had time to get systematic about it yet. Even when I am sure that all machines are set to use the router, some share and some don't. With some advice from this forum, I figured out how to turn on AppleTalk and PPPoE at the same time using the Network preferences to set up two active connections. Some machines that are using the modem directly will AppleTalk, while others won't. And it seems to vary from day to day. On any given day, the one you want to talk to is guaranteed to be unavailable, while others are available. Very frustrating.

Any insights into what is troubling me here? I haven't heard similar complaints in the forums, or found tips related to this here.

[mnewman]

How are your machines getting IP addresses? Do you have IPNetRouter set up to assign via DHCP? If so, try giving each of your machines an assigned IP address so that they always have the same one. I had problems similar to the ones you describe until I gave each machine a fixed IP address.

[houchin]

For your particular connection, I second the mnewman's recommendation to give each system a static IP on your own subnet. In fact, I'd be stronger and say to never use DHCP for your secondary systems. Since you're using only one ethernet connection on the router system, setting that system up as a DHCP server could mean that you're serving DHCP addresses to the entire DSL network (in which case you're provider would be none too happy with you).

[tomem]

That's one mistake I haven't made. IPNetRouter gives good counsel on this and warns against using DHCP when using a single ethernet board on the router machine (which I do). I guess its a good way to irritate one's ISP, in addition to causing local problems. So I assign all IP addresses in my local net.

I don't seem to have problems with TCP/IP, only with AppleTalk (or AppleTalk via TCP/IP, which I suppose the OS X machines are doing, though my understanding of that is a bit fuzzy and I'm not sure about this).

Any other thoughts?

[houchin]

The only thing I can possibly think of is that your hub is not passing AppleTalk packets. You could try disconnecting from DSL, turning off IPNetRouter, and turn off PPPoE and then see if you still have problems.

However, if all you want is apple file sharing, you can do that over TCP IP.
In the connect to box, instead of selecting the system from the list, you would enter the IP address of the desired system:

afp://192.168.1.11

for example.

This should actually be faster than using AppleTalk.

You can even improve that by using /etc/hosts and NetInfo to assign names to each system. Create an /etc/hosts files that looks something like this

192.168.1.11 router
192.168.1.12 bondi
192.168.1.13 tibook

then run the following command from the terminal:

sudo niload -m hosts / < /etc/hosts

This will load your /etc/hosts file into NetInfo


Then, instead of entering afp://192.168.1.12 into the connect to server dialog box, you can enter afp://bondi