I was staring at my walls this weekend and thought... I have ethernet in place of my phone cable in the house - can I use them for something? Most newer homes have their wires in a star hub pattern but when I popped off a plate, I noticed it was 2 sets throughout the house until it got to the end of the run in the master bedroom. This told me that it was probably a wire run in serial so.. what do with it? Setup Localtalk obviously! #appleii #mac #apple #localtalk

Checked in on my #globaltalk setup that was working fine yesterday, but this morning is completely borked. Globaltalk Zones disappeared in Chooser and no file servers in local Zones in Chooser on my Mac Plus.

Restarting jrouter, netatalk, tashtalk (in that order) had GlobalTalk zones come back, and while my EtherTalk zone (Vermilion Sands) showed up in Chooser, my LocalTalk zone (Vermilion Sands LT) does not.

Looking at the jrouter and tashtalk logs there are errors which seem to point to a physical layer problem if checksums aren't matching?

Timing is jrouter got an unmarshaling error (15:19), tashtalk then gives a invalid long DDP header (15:21), then jrouter drops stale buffered packets (15:22).

tashtalk:

2025-04-16 16:21:51,014 DEBUG: tap0 failed to parse AppleTalk datagram from EtherTalk frame: invalid long DDP header, checksum is 0xD42F but should be 0xD22
A

jrouter:

jrouter-1 | Apr 16 15:19:50.440 ERR ZIP: Couldn't handle packet device=br0 error="ZIP GetNetInfo Reply unmarshaling unimplemented"
jrouter-1 | Apr 16 15:22:08.728 WRN EtherTalk: dropping stale buffered packets device=br0 dst-net=1971 dst-node=135 drop=1

#localtalk #ethertalk #vintagemacintosh #retrocomputing #jrouter #livelaughlocaltalk

Think I finally cracked using jrouter, tashtalk and netatalk together to work with netatalk and #globaltalkk

- Separate systems for netatalk and tashtalk
- tashtalk and jrouter can be on the same system
- tashtalk and jrouter must use unique MAC addresses
- tashtalk uses tap interface on a network bridge
- jrouter uses network bridge
- netatalk uses network bridge
- netatalk atalkd.conf set to autodiscover on network bridge
- jrouter is a seed router, netatalk and tashtalk are non-seed routers
- Startup order is: jrouter, netatalk, tashtalk, clients

I tried many things to consolidate down to a single RaspberryPi, but even with adding a USB NIC for jrouter/tashtalk and netatalk on the internal NIC things still wouldn't work 100%.

Packets were somehow "eaten", which was odd because the AppleTalk zones would show up in Chooser, but the netatalk file server wouldn't, or when it did it could give an error when trying to connect to it.

#localtalk #livelaughlocaltalk #raspberrypi #retrocomputing #vintagemacs

While everyone I know is talking about the stock market, I'm over here running tcpdumps to capture Appletalk traffic trying to figure out why my netatalk fileserver only sometimes appears in Chooser and then when does why it can't connect the share on my MacPlus with a TashTalk over LocalTalk.

#appletalk #netatalk #macintosh #retrocomputing #localtalk