[heads up] axing AppleTalk and IPX/SPX

[Stefan Bethke]

Am 28.10.2013 um 13:42 schrieb Gleb Smirnoff <glebius at FreeBSD.org>:

>  The plan is two axe two old networking protocols from FreeBSD head/,
> meaning that FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE, available in couple of years would
> be shipped without them.
> 
> 1) AppleTalk
> 
>   Last time claimed to be supported by vendor in 2007[1]. In practice
>   had very little use since 90th.
>   Discontinued by major routing equipment vendors since 2009[2].

Since Apple has now even deprecated AFP (the file sharing protocol implemented by netatalk, among others), it’s time to let go.

There’s a thriving historic enthusiast community around older Macs and Apple IIs, and I can report that FreeBSD 4 (including then-current versions of netatalk and for those who care, macipgw) works just fine in VirtualBox, on FreeBSD 9-stable. Newer FreeBSD versions will likely work as well. Since AppleTalk (DDP and the layer 3 protocols on top of it) were originally tuned for LocalTalk and it’s 230.4 kbps rate, running a virtualized OS on even very modest hardware will likely incur no performance penalty, so just shove a VM onto any old box.


Stefan

-- 
Stefan Bethke <stb at lassitu.de>   Fon +49 151 14070811