The final step in a month long conquest was to get the IIe Card to boot from the AppleShare server. In its standard configuration it turned out pretty simple. However it did take a while to work out on two fronts. The first I had to have the IIe Card configured properly. You might remember in my earlier posts I put the Apple II Workstation card in slot 1. As it turned out it had to be in slot 7 and the IIe Card Option Panel also needed to be set to boot from Slot 7.
The second configuration change required was a single checkbox in the AppleShare Admin software that needed to be checked. It took a bit of poking around in the AppleShare Admin software to find this preference but it was certainly obvious once I found it, it is called “Enable Apple II Startup Service”.
Once this was done all that was needed was to reboot the IIe Card and it would boot a copy of ProDOS directly from the server. The server volume was allocated to Slot 7, Drive 1 and most ProDOS software behaved as expected.There was one oddity however, ProDOS file utilities such as ShrinkIt, Copy II Plus and Cat Doctor all reported the server volume as 32MB (65535 blocks) but with 0 blocks free. All of these utilities still copied files to the volume with no problems, weird! Launching programs was pretty slow but I am sure things would be faster over ethernet but that is a project for another day and not really in scope for my current RetroChallenge.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. I hope everyone enjoyed my ramblings.
THE END