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This article first appeared in the July 1998 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
Several times during the last few months I've been asked the following question:
I've got a small network and a PPP account with a local provider. Is there any way to get all my machines on the Internet with only one modem and my single PPP account?
This is certainly becoming a more common problem as more small businesses learn the advantages of email and many 'Net savvy families get more than one computer. Luckily, there are several easy solutions, and most of them are inexpensive.
To see how this problem can be solved, let's suppose we have Papa Bear, Mama Bear and Baby Bear, each with their own Macs networked together. Papa's computer is the only one with a modem and they have a PPP account with goldilocks.net. Papa's getting mighty angry with the rest of family always using his computer to check their email or surf the Web. What Papa needs is some software on his computer to route information from his PPP connection to the other computers on his home network. In the parlance of the network trade, such software would turn his computer into a router or gateway. But, more than this, it should do its job in the background so Papa can continue playing Duke Nukem 3D without any loss of firepower and no need to tend the modem.
Such software does exist for the Mac.
The first to appear a few years ago was Vicom Internet Gateway (a. k. a. VIG) from Vicom Technology. VIG would be installed on Papa's machine and all three machines would be given local IP addresses so they could talk to each other.
Suppose Baby wants to surf over to the Disney web page. Papa's machine is configured as Baby's gateway. Acting in the background, VIG tells Papa's machine to open a normal PPP connection to goldilocks.net. All the traffic from Disney is routed through Papa's machine and on to Baby's machine.
While all this is going on, Mama could be reading her mail and Papa could be interactively playing Marathon Infinity with the Big Bad Wolf.
VIG has many other features. It comes with the CyberNOT internet filter, which can be used to keep Baby away from the Playboy page. The other computers on the local network don't have to be Macs and they can be connected by ethernet, Appletalk or Token Ring. The connections can be by regular modem, ISDN or cable. It has powerful AppleScript support, protocol blocking and multi-hosting. A three-user version for the Bear family lists for $249. There is variable pricing, depending on how many computers are on the local network. You can find more information and download a demo version at Vicom's web site, http://www.vicomtech.com.
A while back, Vicom began shipping a stripped-down version of VIG called SurfDoubler. As the name suggests, it does the gateway and routing tricks of VIG, but it's limited to two computers on the local network. SurfDoubler doesn't contain most of the add-ons for VIG, such as CyberNOT and fancy routing. It lists for $99. Information on SurfDoubler can be found on Vicom's web page, listed above.
An interesting newcomer is IPNetRouter. It's published by a company called Sustainable Softworks, which consists of programmer Peter Sichel and his wife. IPNetRouter is only available from their web site at http://www.sustworks.com and is an $89 shareware program. The latest version is 1.1, and a fully working demo can be downloaded from their site.
I've been watching the evolution of IPNetRouter over the last year or so by downloading various preliminary versions and trying them out at home. Starting with a very crude early version, the product has grown up very quickly into a stable and impressive product. I've used it to simultaneously connect four computers to the Internet through one PPP connection. It provides the most important features of VIG at a bargain-basement price.
Of course, IPNetRouter does have some limitations which probably make VIG more desirable for some users. First of all, if your local network is not based on ethernet or Appletalk, VIG will probably work and IPNetRouter probably won't. Another minor drawback is that IPNetRouter requires the machine on which it is installed use Open Transport rather than the older MacTCP. This isn't really much of a limitation, however, because any Mac fast enough to be used as a network gateway is also new enough to handle Open Transport.
VIG is easier to set up. It can automatically sense some things that IPNetRouter has to be told about. But, the web-based documentation for IPNetRouter is fairly complete and straight forward, so most people should have little trouble setting up either product.
I've tried out both VIG and IPNetRouter, and they're both pretty much the same, when they're installed. When a PowerBase 240 with MacOS 8.1 is used as the gateway machine, the only way to tell when another machine on the local network is connected is by looking at the modem lights. There were no problems routing the traffic to and from individual machines, and the individual machines behave as if they're connected directly to the modem.
But, both programs have a problem they can't solve--bandwidth. I used them with a 56K modem, and it's easy to see 56K isn't fast enough for several simultaneous surfing sessions. An ethernet, or even an Appletalk network is so much faster than a 56K modem that the modem becomes a serious bottleneck.
This limitation may soon disappear because wider bandwidth is coming to Louisville homes in a few months. Both cable modems and ADSL connections are being tested in the Louisville area right now, and I expect both programs to be very useful in such a setting.
Software Notes
Apple released Drive Setup 1.5, a revision of their software for formatting and partitioning hard drives. The newest version fixes a problem with the cache on some ATA (IDE) hard drives and makes the program compatible with the new G3 based machines. It can be found at ftp://ftp.info.apple.com/Apple.Support.Area/Apple_SW_Updates /US/Macintosh/Utilities/Drive_Setup/Drive_Setup_1.5.smi.bin.
Before you spend the time to download the new Drive Setup, remember that it will work on all Macintosh ATA drives, but it will only work on Apple-branded SCSI drives. Often, if you have installed a new non-Apple SCSI driver on an Apple SCSI drive, Drive Setup will refuse to recognize the drive.
Way back about ten years ago, Apple began exhorting developers to make their software "32 bit clean" so it could run under the newer operating systems they had coming down the pipeline. Unfortunately, some of the machines Apple was shipping at that time were not themselves 32 bit clean. A then new startup company called Connectix produced MODE32, an extension to fix that problem. Connectix sold MODE32 to Apple and went on to produce other interesting products like the QuickCam, RAMDoubler and Virtual PC.
MODE32 lives on, however, and Apple recently produced another update. MODE32 7.5 enables Macintosh II, IIx, IIcx, or SE/30 systems running Mac OS 7 to run in 32-bit addressing mode. It can be found at the following baroque location http://swupdates.info.apple.com/cgi-bin/lister.pl?Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/US/Macintosh/System/Other_System/.
On the virus front, two new strains of the Autostart 9805 worm have appeared. (See my June column for for more information.) These were named by the virus gurus Autostart 9805-A and Autostart 9805-B.
The Autostart worm has been showing up all over the world. There has even been at least one infection in Louisville. The major virus utilities have been updated to handle it. In addition, there is a free program, called Innoculator, to detect and destroy all three strains of the worm. It can be found at http://www.macoffice.com/innoculator.htm.
Symantec finally got around to releasing the long-awaited update to SAM, called Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh 5.0. Immediately problem reports started coming in from users experiencing sometimes catastrophic disk damage. Symantec says they " have currently become aware of an issue regarding Mac OS 8.1 and Norton AntiVirus. The problem appears to be connected with Norton AntiVirus Auto-Protect and SafeZone scanning on Mac OS 8.1 systems only. We have not seen this issue on any earlier version of the Mac OS. The problem also appears to be intermittent in nature. We recommend that users that experience this issue or other issues contact our technical support staff on-line or via the phone at (541)9847730."
The general consensus is that nobody should use the program until a fix is released.
Louisville Computer Society
Knox Gunn, sales manager for The Complete Mac will give a presentation at the July 27 meeting of the Louisville Computer Society. The Louisville Computer Society meets on the fourth Monday evening of every month at 7:00 PM in the East Government Center on Juneau Drive in Middletown. For more information, see their web site at http://www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.
Art Software Group
The Art Software Group will be meeting July 25 somewhere on the University of Louisville Belknap campus. The title of the meeting is New Media Workshop, and there is a very full schedule, including representatives from RealNetworks, Kinetix, Digital Media and Berstein & Associates as well as a presentation from graphic designer Nancy Stahl. The meeting is open to all. For more information, call (502)895-3811 or email Randy Jarnigan at randy@aol.nu.
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