Re: Networking with Local Talk

Bruce Carter (bcarter@mentor.idbsu.edu)
Sun, 2 Jun 1996 22:36:55 EDT

At 11:31 PM 5/31/96, Emmett Hoops wrote:
>We have two PowerMac 5230's and two LC520's networked. It
>was our hope to be able to run, say, two programs
>simultaneously. But we can't run things at the same time;
>we get a message saying "program already in use." I thought
>that was the idea of networking: that we could use two
>programs off one computer.

You can only run the same copy of an application on a server from two
separate computers on the network if the application is set up to run that
way. There are certain attribute bits that have to be set to allow
multiple simultaneous use of a application, and there are licensing issues.
You should have no problem running single copies of two different programs
from a server. If this is the case, probably what has happened is that the
application was left marked open by a crash or some other abnormal event.
Just restart the server and it should be fine.

>Another question: Why do the programs we're running off the
>network run so slowly?

You are bound by the speed of the network, which is significantly slower
than access to your local hard drive. Some applications that access the
hard drive a lot (like HyperCard) suffer huge performance hits when run
over a network. Others, which load completely into RAM, show little to no
performance problems when run this way. This is noticable over ethernet,
and is a real problem over LocalTalk.

--
Bruce Carter, Instructional Software Designer     (208)385-1851@voice
Boise State University, Boise, ID  83725          (208)385-1856@fax
http://mentor.idbsu.edu/BruceCarter/home.html     bcarter@mentor.idbsu.edu