Bryan Irvine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If the laptop only needs www access no appletalk is needed. Appletalk > is purely a file serving mechanism, like samba or nfs. If you need > appletalk it's pretty easy to set up on OpenBSD.
Well... Appletalk itself is a lower-level protocol than samba or nfs; it's a network protocol which is an alternative to IP. That is, it uses link protocols - these days almost always Ethernet; in the last century often also Localtalk, a 230kbps serial protocol - for transport, and carries upper-level protocols, such as AFP (Apple File Protocol) in turn. A similar protocol (in terms of where it sits in the networking stack) would be IPX.
In 'modern' Mac usage, Appletalk is still used in some environments for file sharing and for printing. Unless you have bits of kit in place which are happy to route Appletalk, it'll only be carried on one LAN segment.
From what I can glean from manpages and Google (and I'll be trying this live in the next month or so, but have no first-hand experience currently) OpenBSD support for Appletalk is available (good) but not turned on in the GENERIC kernel (less good). atalk(4) describes the kernel interface; documentation suggests (but doesn't state authorititavely?) that OpenBSD will route Appletalk among multiple network interfaces; if you want to serve files and/or print, you'll want the netatalk package. There's a 1.6 version in the ports collection; a web page at http://www.doink.org/geeklog/public_html/article.php?story=20051212224355152 describes a recent instance of 'manual' (i.e. outwith the ports collection) compilation of the 2.0 version.
HTH - Stefek
