Dollar-for-dollar, maybe the best money I've ever spend on my system was
buying my parnet cable, so I could link my two Amigas together.  You can make
your own cable, if you're handy with that stuff, but I thought the money I
spent buying a pre-made one was good insurance.  I got my cable from
Redmond Cable, a mail order company, but they're starting to show up in the
stores, so check HT, Fry's, JDR, etc.  The program is PD and can be found on
any decent BBS, just search for "parnet".  Latest release is 3.1, and in- 
cludes an 030 device if both the computers have 030's in them.

  There's two things to note about the parnet system:  First, it's really
like any device; you write/read/delete from it just like normal, pop it up on
one side of the DU, CD to it in a CLI, whatever.  You really just treat it as
just another device.  Sorry to sound repetitious, but people tend to over-
complicate it, when there's really nothing complicated about it.  It's the
"net:" device, that's it.  

  What it does is, it puts all the directories on the other computer "down a
notch" in the disk hierarchy.  "dh0:" is now "net:dh0/".  If I wanted to copy
file xx in Ram to a dir called "Temp" on the other computer's hard drive, I'd
type "Copy Ram:xx net:dh0/Temp".  See the slash after the "dh0"?  Took me
half a year to do it without thinking about it, a real toughie.  I have
fourteen partitions on the board's gig drive, so if I want to copy a MOD file
in Ram to the MODS:  partition, I just "Copy Ram:Modfile.lha net:mods".  Fun,
huh?  And, like I said, you can CD to the other computer, and if you, say,
increase the Stack size, you've increased it for that CLI process on the
other computer, could be dang handy.

  There's no "host" computer with this thing, that's a misnomer.  The "other"
computer, to either computer, is always "net:dh0".  In their respective
mountlists, one's "UNIT 0", the other's "UNIT 1", and it doesn't matter which
one's which.

  Okay, the hook-up:  No biggie, just pick up the cable somewhere, and grab a
parallel port switching box, so you can switch between your parnet system and
the printer.  Works like a charm, the box isn't very expensive.

  That's it!


%Z