from: tether-upgrade
reply-to: tether-upgrade
subject: Old Tether ARA service
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This message is being sent to those Tether users who have made use of
Tether's ARA service over the past 6 months.  As you are aware, we're
working on phasing out the old, obsolete Tether server by the end of
the month, and would like to do the same with the old ARA service at
the same time.  This service is running an ancient version of ARA,
and, due to some limitations of the original ARA protocol, has never
been particularly reliable or maintainable.  It is also extremely
underutilized.

While we plan on discontinuing the old ARA service, there are several
options available to replace it's functionality.  First of all, many
of the applications and services that originally required Appletalk
are now also functional over TCP/IP, and therefore functional over
Tether.  The current exceptions to this are printing and personal
filesharing.  Users of Appleshare servers can have those servers
upgraded to Appleshare IP, which will provide access to those servers
over the TCP/IP protocol.

Users who still need access to Appletalk-only services, and who can
upgrade to MacOS 8.5 (see
http://web.mit.edu/is/help/macos/macos8.5.html), can access a new
Tether feature, support for the ARA 3 protocol.  This allows users to
run both Appletalk and TCP/IP over the same connection, as opposed to
the old service that required seperate calls for each protocol.  The
software needed to do this is part of the standard MacOS 8.5
distribution, and the service is active as part of the standard Tether
service.

It is our desire not to inconvience anyone with this change.  Please
direct any questions to tether-upgrade@mit.edu.  Thank you.

- -Chris Murphy
 MIT Information Systems

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