I wrote:
>I have a Mac connected to a Sun 4 via a serial cable. I have Microphone II
>on the Mac, and have been using Kermit for file transfers. Is there a
>better (free!) utility out there that I can run on the Sun? Microphone
>supports various versions of XModem, YModem and ZModem as well as
>Kermit.
>What has made me really annoyed is Kermit's wonderful ability to
>transfer a complete file and then suffer some sort of problem which
>makes it abort the file transfer and trash the file. A fast, reliable
>transfer is what I really want.
Thanks to all who replied:
franks@fwi.uva.nl (Frank Storbeck)
louis@andataco.com
adam@das.harvard.edu (Adam Shostack)
tierney@george.lbl.gov (Brian Tierney)
kevinc@tekig6.pen.tek.com (Kevin E Cosgrove)
nigel@maths.su.oz.au (Nigel O'Brian)
A common reply was to get hold of zmodem for the Sun. I tried my local
archive, and found one, which works well. It gives a much more
reliable connection than Kermit, even though large transfers frequently
fail. This is because zmodem manages to resurrect failed transfers
from the point of failure. This is what I really needed.
zmodem is not the ideal solution, but it is the best that I have come
up with so far.
Other solutions were offered:
>Ever heard about macget and macput together with a number of terminal
>emulation programs? (VersaTerm, MacTerminal)?
(To which the answer is no - I haven't heard of them.)
>There is a utility called Suntar which runs on a Mac. As you know a
>Sparc can use its floppy drive as an archive device, and you can write
>tar and bar archives on it (using the tapetool for example). If you
>have suntar on your Mac you can do the same thing with the same disks.
>You can also set it up to do ascii translation Unix <--> Mac (i.e.
>changing CR to NL). It's freeware.
I haven't tried this one, but it may be a good solution to a slightly
different problem.
My other gripe was:
>Another point is that Microphone doesn't seem to be able to handle
>binary files (such as compressed files) - it turns them into MacBinary,
>which is useless - compress complains that it has the wrong magic
>number. Am I missing something in the manual? I have Microphone II V3.0.
>Any pointers to the manuals would be appreciated :-).
Nobody commented on this one. On further investigation, what is
happening is that any file transferred in binary from Sun to Mac gets a
282-byte header attached which identifies it as an "Apple single-format
resource file". I have got around this by writing a filter to strip
off this stuff. Not the most elegant solution, but it works :-).
Anyone know why this happens, or whether it is unique to Microphone?
-- John Brownie School of Mathematics and Statistics University of Sydney Internet: jhb@maths.su.oz.au
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:36 CDT