Cisco Compatible Micro Router Series

This document answers frequently asked questions about seeding.

A. You will need to set the Ethernet A AppleTalk Phase 2 status to Seed and use a unique network number for each router. The zone names can be either unique or the same. Use Seed because when using Auto Seed, if there is no other router on the network, each router will auto seed the same net number ? 1. When the WAN link comes up, because both Ethernets are using the same AppleTalk network, no routing will occur. They must be on different networks.

A. fter you change to Seed, the Mac will still think it is on the original AppleTalk network number and won?t be able to see the router. Restart the Mac and it should then be able to see the router on the new seeded network number. Open Transport should notify you when the network number has changed. You will be directed to open the AppleTalk control panel and follow further instructions.

A. On the network with the server, set the frame types that are in use to Non Seed. That router will pick up the network numbers from the server. You should set the unused frame types to OFF.

On the network without a server, set the frame types you want to use to Seed, with a unique network number for each frame type. Do not set the network numbers to the same number as the other network, because a router by definition must route between two different networks.

A. Most likely the problem you're seeing is a Seeding issue. The way AppleTalk Networking works is that there are devices that "seed" the network and devices that look for the seed devices. Routers and Mac servers are common seed devices. These seed devices let all other devices know what their AppleTalk network number is, what node the workstations and printers should be, and what zones they should be seeing.

What commonly happens is that if there is more than one seed device present on an AppleTalk segment, they must all seed "EXACTLY" the same network number AND zones. If the network numbers don't match, then you'll see Mac errors letting you know to contact your AppleTalk administrator. If the zones don't match, the workstations will look in chooser and see zones appear and disappear each time they look. What happens when a Mac goes to chooser is that the workstation calls out on the network for a seed device to tell it what zones are available. If there are two seed devices, 1 with 4 zones and 1 with 2, the chooser may sometimes show 2 zones and sometimes 4. It would depend on which seed device it had found first.

The easiest way to fix this problem is to set one of the seed devices to "Nonseed". This means that this seed device will take it's lead from another seed device on the network.

If you do not know what other devices may be seeding the network (but you KNOW that there's at least one other), the easiest solution is just to set the router to "noseed" for that port and see what happens once you save that configuration to the device. Otherwise, you'll have to track down the other seed device (possibly a new device on the network) and either set it to nonseed or give it the same zones as the router.