On Oct 5, 18:20, Tony Duell wrote: I used to install Econet systems, and upgrade and repair Beebs with Econet. I must have installed or re-installed a few hundred Econet interfaces. A certain large dealer once tried to save money by farming out BBC Model Bs for Econet upgrade jobs to his local ITeC (a sort of training centre of out-of-work youngsters). An upgrade includes lots of 10K, 100K, and 1M resistors, a handful of capacitors, and a bunch of ICs, and on early BBCs most of the passive components get fitted vertically in very tight spaces; not surprisingly, the majority of those upgrades didn't work. I got to be very good at faultfinding on those things before the dealer finally conceded that it would be considerably cheaper to just get me to fit the upgrades in the first place :-) data is 2 Ideally, twisted quad stranded with an overall screen and stranded drain wire, but Cat 3 or better is fine so long as you have the fifth (ground) wire and a half-decent screen. The original Econet in Acorn's Market Hill office in Cambridge ran on telephone cable. You do need the ground connection, though -- two pairs isn't enough on their own. A310 either), with Acorn with There are six Acorn file servers, and some from SJ Research. I don't know much about the SJ ones (except that early ones had some compatibility problems) but the Acorn ones (in date order) are: The original Econet Fileserver -- runs on a System 5, uses 2 x 80-track DS SD floppies, formatted in a unique way. I've not got the software for that, and I've never used it. Level 1 Fileserver -- provides LOAD, SAVE, etc for files, and some utilities such as sending messages, viewing screens, etc, but not much more in the way of file services. Runs on an ordinary Model B with disk^Wdisc interface and normally uses two double-sided 80-track drives (but will work with any drive that supports DFS). Limited to whatever the standard DFS floppies hold (ie subject to the normal DFS file limits). Level 2 Filserver -- runs on a Beeb with a 6502 Second Processor, uses one or two DSSD 80-track drives, same disc format as the System 5 server. Not subject to the DFS number-of-files limits, supports random-access files, etc. Level 3 Fileserver -- runs on a Beeb with Beeb with a 6502 Second Processor, ADFS, and a 10MB or 30MB winchester. The winchester is partitioned, and the Econet Fileserver partitiion has a unique filestructure. Needs a dongle, which is also a TOD clock. Most dongles are now dead (and weren't Y2K compliant) but there's a patch to bypas that. It also came with a modified version of CommunITeL viewdata bulleting board software. Stacking Filestore -- a box that looks like the disc unit from a Master Compact (or a Communicator), with a brown smoked Perspex front flap covering twin 3.5" floppies, basically a revamped Level 3 but able to use floppies or a winchester. The flap is also a control switch; open it to shut down the server, close it to restart. It also includes printer server software. The matching winchester is just a small SCSI drive (yes, real SCSI, not SASI) in a matching box, normally a 3.5" 20MB Rodime drive; you can have up to six IIRC. Level 4 Fileserver -- software application that runs on an Archimedes under RISC OS 2 or later. It really wants an A440 or better, but should just about run on an A310. Uses whatever filing systems/media are available to RISC OS, and can act as an Econet/Ethernet bridge. fileserver? Level 1, 2 and 3 fileserver software isn't hard to come by if you know someone who has it (hint: you do :-)) The discs are copyable. Level 3 is only useful if you have a suitable winchester amd copro on a Beeb, and you'll need the installer discs (I forget whether it's one or two) *and* the anti-dongle patch (unless you want to reverse engineer one of my resin-encapsulated dongles -- but be warned, I've been told by Those Who Know Such Things that the necessary chips haven't been available for many years). You might be able to download Level 4 from the net somewhere. I think I have a copy -- but not a very good one. It went through a few iterations! > Has anyone ever hacked a PC to work as an Econet fileserver? Nope. The Ecolink ISA card only works under MS-DOS 3.21 (or some similar version) and an 8086 machine hasn't the oomph to make much of an Econet system. It even needs a (6502 -- what else?) processor on the Ecolink card to handle basic network operations. Ecolink cards are genuinely rare -- I have one, Jules R has one, and I know of only a couple of others. By convention, an Econet address is two octets, the upper octet is network number ("0" means "the local net"), the lower is the station number. On Beebs, Atoms, Systems, you set the station number with molex links; on later machines you set it in the CMOS. On Master Series machines, you need a special utility because it's in a protected memory area. Address 255 is the broadcast address; 0 is invalid (sound familiar?). By convention, the fileserver is station 254, and the printer server is 235. In some versions of the NFS or ANFS software, stations above 128 (? memory check) are privileged and can force certain operations on unpriv'd stations. Normal stations can *PROTECT themselves from various ops except from priv'd stations (operations include read/write memory blocks, jump to an execution address, force a file load/save etc -- remember this was designed for classroom use). There are Econet interfaces for Systems, Atoms, Beebs (A, B, B+), Master Series (including Compact), ABCs/Scientifics (built in as you've discovered), Electrons (from HCCS, not Acorn, though), and all of the Archimedes/RISC PC range. The A/B/B+ interfaces are a bag of components. The System one is a Eurocard, the Atom one is a plug-on module (as is the Electron one). The later Master Series and RISC machines ones are a small module. There are two versions of the module: originally Acorn designed it with full collision-detect circuitry, then someone decided it would work fine without, at least on an Arc where the faster processor could do some extra work. Sadly, that wasn't borne out in real life, so after a while they reverted to the original design with CD. Issue 2 and 3 Beebs have a lot of the components mounted vertically to save space; they also have provision for clock and/or terminators on the BBC board. This is not a good idea; the original terminator design was an active device, and doesn't work if there's no power (and neither does the clock, obviously!). Issue 2/3 also need a few track cut/rewires. Issue 4/7 have the components laid out horizontally (more sensible) and no provision for clock or terminator on board. The speed of the net depends on the length, the longer the slower. Max speed is obtained with a short network and an asymmetric mark-space ratio on the clock. Early Acorn clock boxes use a square wave; later ones, and SJ ones, have variable mark/space. Early terminator boxes (small light+dark grey Veroboxes) match the clock boxes and provide active termination. Later terminators, and SJ terminators, are passive: DIN plugs with a few resistors, and inferior. Arcs and later RISC-based machines can, not surprisingly, handle faster networks (up to about 500kHz clock) than Atoms/Systems/Beebs (250kHz clock). Torchnet runs on the same hardware as Econet, but uses its own nearly-compatible protocols. The Acorn Printer Server is a 2732 sideways ROM; it doesn't do queueing or anything fancy (ie it can only handle one job at a time) but works with most printers, from dot-matrix to laserjet. The XOB advanced version handles queueing, as does a later one from Acorn for RISC OS. If the server isn't too busy, FS and PS can be on the same machine. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York