I only had two steps left to complete my challenge, getting the IIe Card seeing the server and getting the IIe Card to boot from it. The end was in sight and it seem like a very simple thing to get the IIe Card to see the server. After all, the Mac holding the IIe Card could see the server and mount a volume. How hard could it be, right?
As with anything like this it was easy once you knew what to do. The first thing to do was configure the IIe Card. I needed to install the virtual Apple IIe Workstation Card first. This was simply a drag and drop from the Spare Cards section into a slot in the virtual IIe. I installed it in Slot 1 as that was free, plus I remember that the few times I used Apple IIe Workstation Cards back in the day they were always installed in Slot 1. After making a copy of the Apple Workstation Card software on a 3.5″ disc, setting the IIe to boot from Slot 5 and setting Slot 5, Drive 1 to the internal floppy drive in the SmartPort settings it was time to boot the IIe and see if it can see the server.
Upon startup from the Workstation Card floppy disc I was presented with the “Registering on the AppleTalk Network” screen. This was a very positive sign as this meant the Workstation Card was working, as was the AppleTalk networking protocols. Once the IIe was registered on the network the AppleShare II Workstation Utility launched and presented me with all the networking options available to the IIe Card.
After choosing the “File Server Log On” option the IIe went looking for AFP servers on the network and found my DAVE2 server. I then selected the server and was presented the Username and Password dialog box. During the log on process I found an interesting little bug. If the username (in this case “BILL”) is entered in lowercase the IIe Card will crash into the monitor. Once the username and password are verified a dialog box appears with the available volumes to mount.
Once mounted the volume appears as a NETWORK volume with the Apple System Utility however, weirdly, it wasn’t assigned a “Slot” or “Drive”. I could copy files to the volume but could not launch applications I had copied to it with ProDOS failing with a PATH NOT FOUND error. After a few attempts to get this working without success I decided to just go straight to the next step and see if I could actually boot the IIe from the network volume.
