[nycbug-talk] Noob networking question

[David Lawson]

On Jul 21, 2006, at 2:51 PM, Marco Scoffier wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 12:37:49PM -0400, Brad Schonhorst wrote:
>>> AFP, Apple Filing Protocol, is the protocol that Macs prefer to use
>>> for file sharing. Has very little to do with AppleTalk these days
>>> other than it's one of the few protocols that actually works over
>>> AppleTalk. TCP is the way to go.
>>>
>>
>> I guess that was my question.  When referring to 'AppleTalk File
>> Sharing' are you speaking of AFP?  My understanding was that AFP used
>> to use Appletalk net protocol but now uses TCP port 548.
>>
>> So does the atalk service provide appletalk service (like  
>> netatalk) or
>> AFP over TCP/IP or something else altogether?
>>
> I think I can answer this one.  I was sloppy with the terms before.
> Older OS 9 couldn't do AFP over TCP/IP.  So I had to run atalkd
> and afpd, now you can run afp over tcp/ip.  The FreeBSD man pages and
> config file were a great source of demystification on this one.   
> Atalkd
> runs the appletalk protocol on Unix, and afpd runs the AppleTalk  
> Filing
> Protocol (confusing).  AFP does not require AppleTalk.
>
>>> As said before, you definitely want to use bonjour/mDNS for
>>> announcing the service. Even if you did have some old Mac OS 9
>>> machines on the network, you'd still want to be using mDNS for the
>>> sake of the newer boxes.
>>>
>
> I'm looking up mDNS now.  What are the advantages of this on OSX ?
> Basically everything is hardwired in this small office.  I'm the only
> tech support and I go in like 3 times a year.  They aren't doing
> anything on their own, not even plugging in a new printer... :)

mDNS is essentially the auto-discovery portion of Rendezvous/ 
Bounjour.  It lets devices advertise services they provide and lets  
clients discover servers that provide the services they're looking  
for automatically.

--Dave