Introducing A2SERVER

[Ivan X]

Hello world,

I am very happy to announce A2SERVER, which is a ready-to-go, easy-to-
use file and network boot server for Apple II client computers. It's
basically Netatalk running in a virtual machine, without the
configuration pain. You can read all about it at: http://appleii.ivanx.com/a2server/

I'm expecting that issues will come up, so consider this a soft-
launch, and send me an email if you have questions or comments. I'd
like to make A2SERVER as easy to use as possible and have the web site
be as useful as possible so I'd welcome the feedback.

Thanks to Steven, Geoff, Antoine, and all the others here who have
been so helpful in answering my questions and helping me put this
together.

Cheers,
Ivan.

[Antoine Vignau]

Heeeehh, that's fantastic, congratulations, Ivan!
Antoine

[Alex Lee]

Is it just me, or is anyone else having trouble connecting to
http://appleii.ivanx.com/a2server ?

Alex
--
http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/

[Antoine Vignau]

From France, connection is OK.

[D Finnigan]

Alex Lee wrote:
> Is it just me, or is anyone else having trouble connecting to
> http://appleii.ivanx.com/a2server ?
>
> Alex
>

Must be you.

But if you're impatient now, here is the text from the web page:


A2SERVER


A2SERVER is a file server which runs on current computers, to which Apple II
computers can connect as clients, and use to boot into GS/OS or ProDOS 8
over the network. It has been designed to be as easy to set up and use as
possible, and it's free.

Which Apple II computers are supported?
Apple IIgs (ROM 01 or ROM 03)
Apple IIe enhanced, with Apple Workstation Card

A2SERVER is comprised of Netatalk 2.1.6, running on Ubuntu Server 11.10,
inside an Oracle VirtualBox 4.1.8 virtual machine, plus various scripts I
wrote and utilities from others to make everything smooth.


Choose which method you want to follow, and you'll be up and running
shortly.

Fully Automatic (easy):
download and use a premade virtual machine

Semi Automatic (reasonably easy):
create a virtual machine from scratch, then use automated scripts to turn it
into A2SERVER

Manual (black diamond):
create a virtual machine from scratch, then read and enter the contents of
the scripts to create A2SERVER


Once you're up and running, you may want to check out:

How to connect to A2SERVER from your Apple II

How to boot into ProDOS 8 or GS/OS over the network

Logging into, shutting down, and doing stuff in the A2SERVER console

How to access A2SERVER from a Mac or Windows computer


Many thanks to Steven Hirsch, Geoff Body, Tony Diaz, Antoine Vignau, Peter
Wong, and others at comp.sys.apple2 and KansasFest for the work they've done
and insight they've offered which made it possible to put A2SERVER together.

--
]DF$
Mac GUI Vault - A source for retro Apple II and
Macintosh computing.
http://macgui.com/vault/

[Ivan Drucker]

See, I knew there'd be issues. Like a dead link to the virtual machine
file itself (sheesh). If you tried to download it and got a Page Not
Found before, please try again.

[Steven Hirsch]

Ivan, Do you know offhand if that .ova image can be converted for use with
VMware? I have a $$$ license for Workstation and would like to try it there.

[David Schmidt]

OVA is just the OVF in one file, isn't it? Tarred up? I use OVFs all
the time with VMware. You can deploy OVFs directly.

[Ivan X]

> On 1/19/2012 6:09 PM, Steven Hirsch wrote:
> > Ivan, Do you know offhand if that .ova image can be converted for use
> > with VMware? I have a $$$ license for Workstation and would like to try
> > it there.

On Jan 19, 8:44 pm, David Schmidt <schmi...@my-deja.com> wrote:
> OVA is just the OVF in one file, isn't it?  Tarred up?  I use OVFs all
> the time with VMware.  You can deploy OVFs directly.

It's true that the OVA is just a tarred OVF, though I can't test to
see if it works because VMWare Fusion (what I have) doesn't apparently
support OVA or OVF files.

There's also another option, which is outlined in the "Semi-Automatic"
instructions on the web site -- basically, create a VM in the
virtualizer of your choice, install Ubuntu Server into it (I only
tried the 32-bit version, FWIW), and then kick off the installation
script which builds and configures everything. That's how the OVA file
was made, so it should yield the same thing.

[Steven Hirsch]

That's what about 40% of the mutually-conflicting articles on the net claim,
but VMware Workstation panics trying to boot the extracted vmdks directly. I
downloaded 'ovftool' and tried a conversion that way, but it complains that it
doesn't know anything about "virtualbox-2.2" images. That was after a
protracted fight just getting ovftool to install - it kept throwing an error
about a conflict with an existing VMware resource. Ended up putting it in a
chroot environment. There were hints that - somehow - this function was built
into Workstation 7.5, but damned if I could find it.

I love standards. Everybody should have their own!

Steve

[Ivan X]

I've posted a VMware virtual machine of A2SERVER to go along with the
VirtualBox one. It's up on the web site.

[Hugh Hood]

Ivan,

A2SERVER is quite a work. Nice job on the scripts comprising your
tools/utilities (afptype, etc...)

BTW, have you done anything more with running it all on your Western Digital
MyBook NAS drive? I know you mentioned it at one time.



Hugh Hood



in article
d11f48b6-93a8-4111...@b10g2000pbd.googlegroups.com, Ivan X at
iv...@ivanx.com wrote on 1/20/12 6:18 PM:

[Sean McNamara]

Hi Ivan,

I spent about an hour at my office yesterday setting this up between my Rom
01 IIgs and my MacBook Pro with an iPrint LT PhoneNet bridge - once I
realised I had to move my CFFA3000 from Slot 7, things went swimmingly. I
used one of the What Is The IIgs? System images and converted the Disk Copy
format System Install images to .2mg files using imgutnew.exe from XGS so I
could install the networking stack on the IIgs via the CFFA3K. Overall,
pretty painless.

Only one minor point (since the download link issue has already been
addressed): the password is wrong on the page at
<http://appleii.ivanx.com/a2server/a2server_access.html>, where it says:

"To do this, you may need to find out A2SERVER's IP address. Log into
A2SERVER (default username/password is user1/apple), and type "showip" and
you will be shown the address."

The password is, of course, "apple2".

Otherwise, the site and VM image is a most excellent resource for the Apple
][ community - thanks, Ivan!

Sean "europlus" McNamara

[Steven Hirsch]

You are welcome. Terrific bit of work! With the inclusion of my fix for
netatalk's brain-dead handling of modify dates, it's working perfectly for me.

[apple]

First off, thanks for all the kind words about A2SERVER. I'm glad my
efforts have proved useful!

On Jan 22, 10:24 am, Steven Hirsch <snhir...@gmail.com> wrote:

> With the inclusion of my fix for
> netatalk's brain-dead handling of modify dates, it's working perfectly for me.

What Steve's referring to is a fix he created in the Netatalk source
code relating to modify dates getting inappropriately updated. If
you're already using A2SERVER you can get the fix (without touching
anything in your shared volumes) by typing "a2server-setup" at the
console and letting it go through with setup (it takes a while). I
hope to have new versions of the VM's up tomorrow and then I'll update
the site as well.

On Jan 22, 7:21 am, Sean McNamara <s...@macassist.com.au> wrote:

> I spent about an hour at my office yesterday setting this up between my Rom
> 01 IIgs and my MacBook Pro with an iPrint LT PhoneNet bridge - once I
> realised I had to move my CFFA3000 from Slot 7, things went swimmingly. I
> used one of the What Is The IIgs? System images and converted the Disk Copy
> format System Install images to .2mg files using imgutnew.exe from XGS so I
> could install the networking stack on the IIgs via the CFFA3K. Overall,
> pretty painless.

Awesome. And, you've got something interesting here: you're saying
it's working with the Farallon iPrint LT. I have one of those, and the
last time I tested it with a IIgs, which admittedly was a while ago,
it would work for about 2-3 minutes before freezing like my other
Farallon adapters. So is it staying up and solid for you?

> Only one minor point (since the download link issue has already been
> addressed): the password is wrong on the page at
> <http://appleii.ivanx.com/a2server/a2server_access.html>, where it says:

Thanks. Fixed.

On Jan 22, 3:07 am, Hugh Hood <hughh...@earthlink.net> wrote:

> BTW, have you done anything more with running it all on your Western Digital
> MyBook NAS drive? I know you mentioned it at one time.

Yeah. I have a first-gen Western Digital My Book World Edition, which
is a Linux-based stand-alone NAS. That was what I was going to turn to
next. Netatalk already runs on it, but the issue is that the AppleTalk
kernel module isn't supplied with the version of Linux on the drive,
which we need for Apple II. So it has to be compiled.

However, rather than focus on a model that's several years old --
which would involve real effort on my part -- I'm thinking that I
might instead pick up a My Book Live, which is what WD is currently
selling. It also runs Debian Linux, which is the basis for Ubuntu, so
I should be able to leverage much of the work I've already done for
A2SERVER, and apparently you can compile right on the box. So, at
least without having seen it yet, I'm optimistic.

[Ivan X]

Whoops, I didn't realize I was logged into the wrong account.
Apologies.

[Sean McNamara]

> Awesome. And, you've got something interesting here: you're saying
> it's working with the Farallon iPrint LT. I have one of those, and the
> last time I tested it with a IIgs, which admittedly was a while ago,
> it would work for about 2-3 minutes before freezing like my other
> Farallon adapters. So is it staying up and solid for you?

Hmm, I did have problems with my first session (couldn't reload after
unmounting the share, may have been in as little as 2-3 minutes after
connecting), and wasn't able to dedicate a long time on the second session
after rebooting the IIgs - now I've lent my CFFA3K out for the rest of the
week, so I'll have to wait till I get that back before I can do more
thorough testing. But I will, and will report back. I'll have to dig up my
other LocalTalk bridge to see what make and model it is and try that as
well.

Sean

[Steven Hirsch]

On 01/22/2012 09:03 PM, apple wrote:

> Awesome. And, you've got something interesting here: you're saying
> it's working with the Farallon iPrint LT. I have one of those, and the
> last time I tested it with a IIgs, which admittedly was a while ago,
> it would work for about 2-3 minutes before freezing like my other
> Farallon adapters. So is it staying up and solid for you?

Until Geoff Body finishes his rewrite of the link-layer, it's unlikely that
devices like the Farallon iPrint LT will work reliably with the IIgs.

[Ivan X]

On Jan 24, 7:59 am, Steven Hirsch <snhir...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Until Geoff Body finishes his rewrite of the link-layer, it's unlikely that
> devices like the Farallon iPrint LT will work reliably with the IIgs.

My experience with IIgs bridges, with Netatalk or AppleShare 3.0 is
this:

Farallon: works as expected for 2-3 mins, then locks up

Dayna: AppleShare control panel hangs or crashes when opened (in
different ways on ROM 01 and 03). Network boot works, however.

Asante: If it figures out it's on a phase 2 AppleTalk network during
its startup, it behaves like the Dayna products

Mac w/LocalTalk Bridge: works well for everything

It would be great to figure out a way to get one of these bridges
working correctly for IIgs users, because a Mac with LocalTalk bridge
seems to be the only viable, commonly available option.

[Ivan X]

I've posted updated versions of the A2SERVER virtual machine files
which incorporate Steven's modification date fix, and a fix to Windows
file sharing where you can now log in as an authenticated user. Thanks
to Steven for both of these.

Keep in mind that these virtual machines have empty virtual share
folders, so if you're already up and running and want to keep your
shared files as they are, you can instead log into the console and
type "a2server-setup" to receive the fixes.

[Steven Hirsch]

On 01/24/2012 11:01 AM, Ivan X wrote:
> On Jan 24, 7:59 am, Steven Hirsch<snhir...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Until Geoff Body finishes his rewrite of the link-layer, it's unlikely that
>> devices like the Farallon iPrint LT will work reliably with the IIgs.
>
> My experience with IIgs bridges, with Netatalk or AppleShare 3.0 is
> this:
>
> Farallon: works as expected for 2-3 mins, then locks up

This is the problem Geoff is hoping to correct. There appears to be an issue
with the implementation that eventually causes the session to drop.

[Hugh Hood]

Ivan,

A 1 TB Apple II server for $150 would be great.

There might even be a _little_ room left over for non-Apple II stuff, I
suppose.

We'll sit tight and stay tuned.

Thanks.



Hugh Hood

[dabone]

I finally got a Asante appletalk bridge to play with, and I must say, this was very easy to get running. Thanks!

Slow as *(^(*, but it runs. I've been copying on of my 32meg HD images from my cffa3000 to the a2server for a very very long time now.

I've got the bridge plugged into a wireless bridge, and had no problems seeing and booting from the server.

Later,
dabone

[Ivan X]

Per Andrew Roughan's suggestion, I wanted to mention that what's above in this thread regarding bridges and their behaviors is no longer accurate for A2SERVER (though still accurate for regular Netatalk not installed with A2SERVER).

Steven Hirsch figured out a Netatalk patch that fixes the Asante and Dayna issues, and Geoff Body provided a fix for GS/OS which resolves the Farallon issues on IIgs. So all three types of bridge can now be used reliably on either IIe or IIgs, and this has been the case since the April 2013 update to A2SERVER. Thanks, dudes. (The Farallon bridge still can't be used on a IIgs booted directly into ProDOS 8, however.)

There's a more extended explanation of the particular bridges and their issues at:
http://ivanx.com/a2server/a2server_lan.html

Any declarative changes about these things will go on that page.

[Steven Hirsch]

On 08/18/2014 09:28 AM, Ivan X wrote:

> Per Andrew Roughan's suggestion, I wanted to mention that what's above in
> this thread regarding bridges and their behaviors is no longer accurate for
> A2SERVER (though still accurate for regular Netatalk not installed with
> A2SERVER).

> Steven Hirsch figured out a Netatalk patch that fixes the Asante and Dayna
> issues, and Geoff Body provided a fix for GS/OS which resolves the Farallon
> issues on IIgs. So all three types of bridge can now be used reliably on
> either IIe or IIgs, and this has been the case since the April 2013 update
> to A2SERVER. Thanks, dudes. (The Farallon bridge still can't be used on a
> IIgs booted directly into ProDOS 8, however.)

Hi, Ivan. Can you describe the exact scenario you're having troubles with
when running the Farallon and IIgs? I don't recall any problems using it with
the IIgs, but probably didn't hit the exact combination you were trying.

I should also stress that my fix for the Netatalk protocol advertisement was a
complete WAG-driven hack that wouldn't have been possible without Geoff having
explained the underlying issue in detail :-).

[Ivan X]

On Tuesday, August 19, 2014 8:16:46 AM UTC-4, Steven Hirsch wrote:
> On 08/18/2014 09:28 AM, Ivan X wrote:
>
> > Per Andrew Roughan's suggestion, I wanted to mention that what's above in
> > this thread regarding bridges and their behaviors is no longer accurate for
> > A2SERVER (though still accurate for regular Netatalk not installed with
> > A2SERVER).
> >
> > Steven Hirsch figured out a Netatalk patch that fixes the Asante and Dayna
> > issues, and Geoff Body provided a fix for GS/OS which resolves the Farallon
> > issues on IIgs. So all three types of bridge can now be used reliably on
> > either IIe or IIgs, and this has been the case since the April 2013 update
> > to A2SERVER. Thanks, dudes. (The Farallon bridge still can't be used on a
> > IIgs booted directly into ProDOS 8, however.)
>
> Hi, Ivan. Can you describe the exact scenario you're having troubles with
> when running the Farallon and IIgs? I don't recall any problems using it with
> the IIgs, but probably didn't hit the exact combination you were trying.

It's been a while since I've tried, but the Farallon bridges work fine on a IIgs at first, but after about five minutes following startup, the shared volume drops, or the IIgs locks up entirely. I've tried this with the Farallon PN842, PN848, and PN559, which is basically all of them, and I've tried it with the AppleShare control panel as well as netbooting into GS/OS and ProDOS 8. Same thing all around. Problem doesn't exist with Workstation Card for IIe; only IIgs LocalTalk. Geoff found some timing-related issue and was able to fix it with a GS/OS patch to be added to SYSTEM/SYSTEM.SETUP, and that's downloadable on the A2SERVER page. (I think in my testing with you we discovered you were immunized to some of the bridge problems I was seeing because of the GatorBox you also had on the network, so maybe this doesn't apply to you.)

> I should also stress that my fix for the Netatalk protocol advertisement was a
> complete WAG-driven hack that wouldn't have been possible without Geoff having
> explained the underlying issue in detail :-).

Well, it was a really excellent WAG. I'd rather be lucky than good. Thanks again.

[Steven Hirsch]

On 08/19/2014 03:32 PM, Ivan X wrote:
> On Tuesday, August 19, 2014 8:16:46 AM UTC-4, Steven Hirsch wrote:

>> Hi, Ivan. Can you describe the exact scenario you're having troubles
>> with when running the Farallon and IIgs? I don't recall any problems
>> using it with the IIgs, but probably didn't hit the exact combination you
>> were trying.

> It's been a while since I've tried, but the Farallon bridges work fine on a
> IIgs at first, but after about five minutes following startup, the shared
> volume drops, or the IIgs locks up entirely. I've tried this with the
> Farallon PN842, PN848, and PN559, which is basically all of them, and I've
> tried it with the AppleShare control panel as well as netbooting into GS/OS
> and ProDOS 8. Same thing all around. Problem doesn't exist with Workstation
> Card for IIe; only IIgs LocalTalk. Geoff found some timing-related issue
> and was able to fix it with a GS/OS patch to be added to
> SYSTEM/SYSTEM.SETUP, and that's downloadable on the A2SERVER page. (I think
> in my testing with you we discovered you were immunized to some of the
> bridge problems I was seeing because of the GatorBox you also had on the
> network, so maybe this doesn't apply to you.)

Ah, ok. Since the timing bug is in the GS firmware, it makes sense that you'd
be seeing it when running under pure ProDOS 8. I have a feeling that
switching to P8 from GS/OS works fine if you have Geoff's init fix installed.

[Ivan X]

On Tuesday, August 19, 2014 3:44:35 PM UTC-4, Steven Hirsch wrote:

> Ah, ok. Since the timing bug is in the GS firmware, it makes sense that you'd
> be seeing it when running under pure ProDOS 8. I have a feeling that
> switching to P8 from GS/OS works fine if you have Geoff's init fix installed.

Yes, I've tested that, and it does indeed work fine if the fix is installed.