Performa 475 (OS 8.1) --> Ethernet --> Power Mac G4 (OS 9.2)??

Question

Performa 475 (OS 8.1) --> Ethernet --> Power Mac G4 (OS 9.2)??

Greetings,

I have a Performa 475 pizza box Mac with an Ethernet card. 10-15 years ago, I was able to connect it via Ethernet to the 7100 and 8500 I had way back in those days. Now I've pulled it out of mothballs and am trying to connect it to my Power Mac G4 (PCI Graphics) which is booted into OS 9.2, but I'm having no success. The LED on the Ethernet card lights up to indicate the presence of traffic on the cable if I connect both it and the G4 to my Ethernet router via straight-through cable, or if I connect the Performa directly to the G4 via crossover cable. But that's as far as I'm getting.

I've tried a wide various combinations of settings on the Performa end (TCP/IP, AppleTalk, FileSharing), but nothing works. Basically, neither machine has any knowledge of the other's presence.

Is there just too great an age/technology gap between these two machines, or am I missing one or more magic steps?

Any suggestions??

Thanks!
DM

Posted on Jan 6, 2014 10:14 PM

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Answer 1

Jan 7, 2014 5:24 AM in response to Doctormelodious

These two machines will see each other just fine. The gap is nowhere near too great.

Start at the beginning. Can each machine, when connected to the router, see the internet? Fire up a browser and see if it can reach, say, google.com. That will tell you if their respecitve TCP/IP stacks are happy and healthy, and if they're being served an IP address by the router (assuming they're both DHCP... I'm not positive about that in 8.1).

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Answer 2

Jan 9, 2014 10:56 PM in response to JustSomeGuy

Hi JSG,

Thanks for your reply. The cable modem is connected to the Ethernet router's WAN/Internet port. The G4 and the Performa are each connected to regular Ethernet ports on the router.

The G4's TCP/IP control panel is set to DHCP, and the router is serving it an address. It is able to connect to the Internet.

When I set the Performa's TCP/IP control panel to DHCP, it just sits there, never getting an address from the router. I open Netscape and it tries to connect to Apple, but fails because it doesn't have an Internet connection. I then set its TCP/IP to manual, and type in an IP address within the legal range (192.168.1.50), populating the remaining fields (subnet mask, router, etc.) as per the G4's settings, saving the new configuration and making it active. But still no go. Rebooting doesn't help either.

So again, the only sign of life with the Performa's Ethernet card is that the green LED on the back still flashes when the cable is connected. It is failing to talk to the outside world.

BTW, in order to install OS 8.1 (which is on CD-ROM) on the Performa, I had to move the Performa's internal HD to the G4 (which has a SCSI card), and run the installer on that machine (which is running 9.2.2). All of the installers ran successfully. But I noticed that, while the installer CD's OWN System Folder included all of the Apple Ethernet-related extensions, the System Folder it CREATED on the destination drive contained none of them -- and I had enabled the Internet stuff when I selected the installer options. So, I dragged them all from the CD's Extensions Folder into the destination drive's Extensions Folder. Here is a list of the ones I copied:

Apple 10/100 Fast Ethernet

Apple Built-In Ethernet

Apple Ethernet CS

Apple Ethernet CS II

Apple Ethernet LC

Apple Ethernet NB

Ethernet (Built-In)

EtherTalk Phase 2

Seems odd to me that I would have to do that. Is there something else I need to make the Ethernet card work?

Thanks again for your reply, and I remain open to any and all suggestions.

DM

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Answer 3

Jan 10, 2014 4:46 AM in response to Doctormelodious

You were very clever to do the install on a surrogate machine. But that is also what's making it fail now. During the install, the Performa's Ethernet hardware wasn't detected (obviously, since the installer wasn't running on the Performa at the time) and so the driver wasn't installed and configured at that time. I don't know what other steps you'd have to go through to connect the right driver at boot time, since simply copying all the files into the extensions folder doesn't seem to be enough.

Edit: I see that the Performa 475 didn't come with built-in Ethernet - so there may be a separate driver that needs to be installed from floppy, depending on where the add-on Ethernet adapter came from.

What was the reason why you couldn't do an install natively on the Performa? Lack of SCSI-attached CD drive?

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Answer 4

Jan Hedlund

Level 7

24,301 points

Jan 10, 2014 4:52 AM in response to Doctormelodious

Hi DM,

When the Performa 475 was used 10-15 years ago, did it then have the same 8.1 system (it appears as if you have done the system installation only recently)? Is it a retail system CD (not a machine-specific one)?

Generally speaking, carrying out a system installation onto a hard drive which is temporarily placed in another machine (running a different system) is not optimal (if/when at all possible). The installer should have some kind of universal option for all Macintosh computers. I do not know whether this could be part of the problem here.

Any information about the Ethernet card make/model?

If necessary, you could always install a complete System 7.5.3 instead. It has been made available for download from Apple as nineteen floppy-sized files (but it is not a normal set of system floppies; see the text file).

http://www.info.apple.com/support/oldersoftwarelist.html

When using System 7.5.3, choose Open Transport networking in the Network Software Selector (in an Apple Extras folder).

Jan

EDIT: Just noticed that JSG had already commented the installation on another machine.

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Answer 5

Jan 12, 2014 11:56 AM in response to Doctormelodious

Thanks for the additional responses, JSG and Jan.

Yes, the machine already had 8.1 installed on it. I bought it ca. 2000 from the now long-defunct Refurb Madness (really nice folks). They are most likely the ones who installed Mac OS 8.1 on it, and they probably did it via an external SCSI CD-ROM drive. Good point about the installer needing to be aware of the hardware to which the drive will be attached "in real life." I'm pretty sure I chose "Any Macintosh" in the installer options, but that still may not have been enough for it

For now this project is being moved to the back burner. I will update my post when I am able to take another swing at it.

Thanks again!

DM

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