AppleTalk tip
By Richard Bennett
Copyright (c) 1994 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
I just solved a problem that's been annoying me for almost six months now, and thought I'd share it with everyone. Talk about traps for young players, AND OLD ONES!
My Apple IIgs has three boot partitions, which I select with a RamFAST, depending on what I'm doing during that session. One of these is a fast boot (ie. very few INITs/DAs etc.) which starts AppleTalk and logs on to my Macintosh automatically and uses AppleShare to gain access to one of the Mac's drives.
About six months ago, the boot process started getting slower and slower, until it got to the stage where it was taking up to 30-40 seconds longer than I thought it should have. I checked the Zip GSX, and for around 30 seconds or so, the cache light was almost hard on. Check the Zip settings! Nope, the AppleTalk switch made no difference. Either did changing any of the slot speed switches. Re-install 6.0.1? No difference. Remove EVERY INIT and DA (including the Apple ones, except for Control Panels NDA and the AppleShare related Control Panels. Same problem.
I didn't have time to look any further, so I forgot about it.
Recently it had been getting worse, so I decided to take another look. I dropped into debug during the "hard on delay" and found it madly polling the serial ports. Why?
Perhaps it's confused! Delete CDev.data. Same problem. Check out ATInit and AppleShare.Prep. Ahh!
Because my Mac had been reformatted a number of times, the server name had changed. The IIGS was trying to log on to every past server name which I'd used, and was "madly polling" waiting for them all to come online.
Even though only the current name appears in the AppleShare Control Panel, setup data STILL contains the old information! I deleted "ATInit" and "AppleShare.Prep", went in and logged on to the Mac again, and rebooted with the new parms. The IIGS booted to the desktop, with the Mac volume mounted, in under 10 seconds!
Sooo... If you think AppleShare is pretty slow, try deleting "ATInit" and "AppleShare.Prep", reboot, re-logon, and reboot again. Both of these files are in "*:System:System.Setup".

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