Macintosh-to-HP/UX Connectivity

I have an HP9000 running HP/UX and a LocalTalk network with many Macintosh systems and connected by Farallon's PhoneNET StarController system. I would like to convert the LocalTalk system to run Ethernet (Farallon has the PhoneNET StarController EN, which should do the job).

However, HP's implementation of TCP/IP runs across 802.3 networks and not Ethernet. Our TCP/IP implementation (via MacTCP) pumps out Ethernet packets and not 802.3. I want to connect the Macintosh computers to the HP/UX system to do file transfer (no file conversion necessary), terminal emulation, and SMTP.

Can you suggest any third-party gateways that can convert Ethernet packets to 802.3 on an Ethernet-based StarController EN network? Do you see any potential implementation problem based on the PhoneNET StarController EN to HP/UX?
The product of choice for this type of conversion seems to be the cisco router. If you want to translate HP 802.3 to Ethernet on the same cable, you can configure the cisco to do that. It's been in the product for three or four years. 802.3 to Ethernet was one of their original design goals.

If you want or need a bridge, HP bridges work fine with both Ethernet and HP 802.3 encapsulation. For more details, search the Technical Info library under "cisco."
Published Date: Feb 18, 2012