at the temporal coordinates: 11/7/01 11:24 PM, the entity known as Lou
Forlini at lforlini_at_sspi-software.com conveyed the following:
>
> On Tue, 2001-11-06 at 18:51, Ken Whitcomb wrote:
>> "Chatty AppleTalk device" is a redundancy. Apple decided early on that
>> when you opened your Chooser, network devices had to appear within 5
>> seconds for UI reasons. Accordingly, since there is no concept of a
>> browse master or name server in the peer-to-peer AppleTalk world, every
>> AppleTalk device performs a network broadcast of its name and
>> capabilities, every 5 seconds or so, to every other machine on its
>> Ethernet segment.
>
> I don't know where you got that information. I have 3 Macs and 2
> printers on my Ethernet network, all 3 Macs have AppleTalk turned on.
> The only activity that goes across my network is when the machines
> first boot up (or printers turn on), when the Chooser is open, or if
> one of the machines has file sharing enabled. With file sharing
> enabled, then I get a short broadcast every 60 seconds, otherwise
> it's dead silent. The Macs are running 7.6.1, 8.6, and occasionally
> 10.1. Hardly the definition of "chatty".
YES! That's my recollection. That's why I was wondering about the
explanation that was given. If you're just using a few AppleTalk printers
and maybe one AppleTalk file server, aren't those the only items doing
broadcasts. But since I know nothing about the details of how networks work
I accepted the explanations.
After thinking more on this, though, there were two things that I wondered
about. First, just how big is this broadcast that each AppleTalk device
sends? Second, I'm not clear on how OTHER protocols are less of a burden on
bandwidth. After all, (going back to my example of the 20 MB file sent over
the network to a spooler, only to be sent over the network AGAIN to the
printer), regardless of where that file is addressed to, isn't that STILL
just a bunch of packets on the wire, or on the hub/router? Isn't the
difference simply on one hand a small amount of info sent everywhere versus
huge chunks clogging the choke points?
But again, to paraphrase Dr. McCoy... "Dammit, I'm a physicist, not a
network engineer!" :-)
- Eric.
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