Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:17:32 -0400
From: Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com>
Subject: LocalTalk
Hi. I'm looking for a LocalTalk->Ethernet bridge and some LocalTalk
cables. Anyone have any available?
I don't have one available but the product names you are looking for include:
AsantePrint
MicroAsanteprint
AsanteTalk
in order from oldest to more recent. All three of those were by Asante.
There were similar products from Farallon and Dayna, but I do not remember
the specific product names. All of those will bridge from LocalTalk to
Ethernet, but I think they only bridge the AppleTalk protocols and not
TCP/IP.
The latter two are about the size of a deck of cards and pretty much look
identical, except there's a variation on the middle one with a BNC
connector in addition to the RJ45 jack. The earlier two have more network
management features which one is unlikely to use in a home network.
For LocalTalk cabling, unless there's some reason you really want to use
original LocalTalk cabling, you should get PhoneNet connectors and use
phone cable for the connections. The PhoneNet connectors are a dongle
(available in many different brands) which plug into the serial
(LocalTalk) port and have two RJ11 jacks on the other end. The RJ11 jacks
can be used to form a daisy chain network. If a PhoneNet connector is at
the end of the chain (only one jack used) then the unused jack should have
a terminating resistor installed. I don't remember the value.
Finally, PhoneNet uses the two wires in four conductor cable, which the
telephone system does not use (yellow/black vs. red/green). However,
there are a lot of telephone cables out there shipped with modems which
only include the telephone pair and not the pair which PhoneNet needs.
You can spend a lot of time trying to diagnose a PhoneNet connectivity
problem when the necessary wires are absent from your cable. :-)
When ethernet became very affordable, old PhoneNet equipment was more or
less being given away free. Most of it has been disposed of by now, so it
may be a bit challenging to find, but probably not too challenging. I
remember seeing a lot of 150 PhoneNet dongles go for something like $.99
plus shipping. :-) But that was probably eight years ago.
Jeff Walther