Big Book of Amiga Hardware

The QuickNet card is quite unique amongst Amiga ethernet cards. It contains an EPROM which holds both the SANA-II driver and custom QuickNet networking. You can choose which software you wish to use by selecting a jumper on the back of the card. The QuickNet software is a fast peer-to-peer networking solution designed for Amiga's on an ethernet network and allows hte sharing of drivers etc. It is unclear whether the QuickNet software sits on top of TCP/IP, but this is believed not to be the case. In addition to the software in the EPROM, there is additional software to be installed on the "master-server", which is the machine that is likely to be rebooted the least. You need to install the software only on this machine. The disk-sharing process for all "slave" machines is done completely from the master. Each board has its own "physical" address which is used to recognize the board on the network. Once the "master-server" is completely installed, all the "slave" machines will display a requester when they boot, containing a "username" and a "password" field. The slaves can use any of the drives exported by the server, just as if they were local disks. The device recognises the ".backdrop" icons of the WorkBench 2.x and all the snapshots made. The network is completely transparent to the user! For each user, you may set up different access levels, different configurations, and different shared disks. You should do this only on the "server" machine. If you need to make a machine, you need to change only the configuration of the "master-server" to add the address of the new board in the list. On some diskless machines, you may boot remotely from another machine on the network. You do not need a hard disk in any of the slaves. QuickNet has an ARexx port. It allows you to send ARexx scripts to other machines in the network! You may, for example, pilot a slideshow on all the machines on the network from a single machine. You could also use it in schools so the teacher may run tutorial software on the students' machines, etc. Additional information can be found . The network card itself connects to the side expansion slot of the A500.

** Quicknet boards contain a switch which allows the produce ID to be toggled between 1 and 2. The MNI driver supports both ID's, however it is highly recommended that you set it to ID 2 as this has much better performance. Some versions of the card however, can only be set to product ID 1, regardless of the switch setting.