My name is Ramon Hontanon, and I'm the network specialist for Dr. Marti's
Flow Cytometry Lab, at CBER FDA. I think I can shed some light on your
connectivity problem.
While the BD folks only support the FUSION package, we currently use
FACSnet with a wide variety of products, on PC, Macintosh, VMS, and Unix
machines. All the TCP/IP transport packages that we use are in the
public domain.
The main thing to keep in mind is that FACSnet uses TCP/IP as its protocol,
and will "talk" to any other machine that uses that same protocol.
Furthermore, some machines speak more than one protocol. For instance,
here at CBER FDA, most machines can perform TCP/IP, DECnet, and AppleTalk
transfers, over the same thin-ethernet connection.
While I have no experience with Novell Workplace, I am pretty certain
that Novell offers an (optional ?) module that allows your computer to
"talk" TCP/IP as well as IPX/SPX (the native protocol for Novell products).
Note that both TCP/IP and Novell packets will coexist on the same wire,
thanks to the design of the Ethernet protocol, and you will only need
one NIC (network interface card) to capture all protocol types.
Perhaps you can get BD to tell you about the specific problems in using
Novell to share files with FACSnet, so we can address those in this forum.
Hope this helps!
Best regards,
ramon
___________________________________________________________________
Ramon J. Hontanon, KE8SF
ramon@helix.nih.gov
CBER FDA (NIH), 8800 Rockville Pk. Bethesda, MD 20892
(301) 496 0718