>Not that Ive done it either, but the Mac serials are said to be 
>standard RS422 ports.  So except for the strange plug shape, all the 
>usual methods of hooking up & controlling external serial modems 
>should apply.

The bits that are different, though, have to do with the ctrscts 
stuff, since the re simply aren't enough pins in the Mac serial port 
to support all the controls that PeeCee serial ports are used to.

>Has anyone tried ppp or netatalk between macs over direct serial cables?

PPP is certainly doable, but LocalTalk is not supported under NetBSD. 
You can only use AppleTalk across the ethernet port.

Although...you may be able to use PPP across the serial port, and via 
that, use asun's IP-enabled NetAtalk to talk across the PPP 
connection. It would be 1/4 the speed of a LocalTalk connection, but 
if you're trying to connect a non-ethernet-enabled MacOS machine to a 
NetBSD using it as an AppleShare server, it should be possible.

>   I know people have said those localtalk boxes are unsupported, but 
>I thought direct links should work.  This is another thing on my 
>list to try...  On a direct link, RS422 can do 10Mbit/s, according 
>to the spec.

Conflicting problems...we don't support AppleTalk over the serial 
port (LocalTalk), and those boxes don't support TCP/IP bridging, so 
we can't use TCP out of the serial port. So no matter what protocol 
stack we're referring to, you can't get there from here.

The LocalTalk boxes don't need support. You can (and many do) use the 
LocalTalk boxes to connect printers to an ethernet-enabled NetBSD 
box. So you can use the boxes...you just need to reverse them from 
the way you were thinking. This is assuming that by "localtalk 
boxes", you're referring to things like the iPrint, EtherPrint, 
AsanteTalk, gatorbox, etc. and aren't using it to refer to the 
boxy-looking PhoneNet adapters.

>About transfer between partitions, have you tried the hfsutils 
>package?  I assume you are talking about transferring stuff other 
>than the install sets.  For that much, the traditional installer has 
>usually worked fine for me.

Traditional installer will work for non-install-set stuff as well. 
Use its minishell and issue the cpin/cpout commands.

>Maybe hfsutils is something the mac68k port should include in the 
>base install set.

Install sets shouldn't have much in the way of port-specific 
customization., no matter how useful.

HTH,
Mike
-- 
Bikers don't *DO* taglines.