🚀 go-pugleaf

After some delays, I finally received the IPT software today. Its official
name is "IPT Personal Server Network."
 
I have just started to play with it. It is very very rough around the
edges, but the important point is that it appears to work! Sometime next
week I will post my benchmark suite, and results for AppleShare and IPT-PSN.
Novell results will follow a bit later.
 
The title of this (and my earlier) article says "this month."  From the
state of the software, I'd say that that's an overoptimistic estimate, but
not by a whole lot. I'd guess early June.
 
So far, there don't seem to be any conflicts with the DeskTop Manager INIT
with it running on _both_ the server and the client. I don't know how it
would behave in a mix-and-match environment but I expect it would be OK.
 
Memory consumption on the server machine appears to be minimal. I've noted
RAM usage increasing by 30-50K with the server active (this is quite a bit
less than TOPS, for example) but I have not done extensive tests on this yet.

The user interface of the administrator program is where the rough edges
come in. It's quite ugly and there are a few visual anamolies. Still, I am
very encouraged by their response to my bug reports, since they are generally
of the form "Wow, I'm glad you found that, we'll fix it right away."  For
those of you who remember my article about Beta-testing, this is a company
that apparently knows how to do Betas right.

Have a good weekend, more will follow next week.

---
Alexis Rosen
alexis@ccnysci.{uucp,bitnet}
alexis@rascal.ics.utexas.edu  (last resort)