Over the past several years, AppleTalk has become outdated in many ways. A large network such as NUNet requires special hardware and software to support AppleTalk despite its ease of use. Many networking vendors consider it to be of secondary importance in developing their products; because of this, the next upgrade of routers on the NUNet backbone will not support AppleTalk. We strongly recommend you have your systems converted or upgraded to use something other than AppleTalk by October 1, 2001, because AppleTalk routing will be turned off on January 1, 2002 February 19, 2002.

Recently IT-Telecommunications and Network Services gave a presentation on this change. The End of AppleTalk PowerPoint presentation is now available for download in both Stuffit format and Zip format (156 KB).

When the routers are upgraded, there will no longer be AppleTalk zones on campus. Apple's most recent file serving and printing software can operate across subnets without AppleTalk zones, so this will not stop all services. Unfortunately, many programs that use AppleTalk for communications have not been updated to work this way, so some devices which are currently accessible from anywhere on the network will only be accessible from their subnet after the zones are removed.

Will this affect me?

This won't affect you if you will only be accessing AppleTalk computers and printers that are in the same subnet (or zone) as your computer, and people from other subnets don't need to access your AppleTalk devices.

For most of us, however this will affect us greatly.
 

How? Can you explain this a little better?

I'm glad you asked. This is best explained by using some illustrations (note that these may not be exactly technically accurate):

 

The routers can send information from one subnet to another; computers from different AppleTalk zones can speak to each other.

The router doesn't pass the AppleTalk information to different subnets; computers and printers must be set up to communicate in other ways.

 

Basically what this comes down to is that computers and printers will have to talk to each other using TCP/IP instead of AppleTalk. Some computers may need their software upgraded and configured, and others may not work at all.

To find out what changes you need to make, click on one of the links below according to your situation. You will find these links throught this site in the purple bar on the above left.