Is there anyone left here that could help me with a couple questions about this ancient operating system I have to support?

We have a Strippit 1000/20 turret punch press in our shop. It uses a Power Macintosh 7200/120 as its control. For a computer that's been in a hot/humid factory since 1997, it's held up pretty well.... until recently.

At one point a few years ago, I installed NCSA Telnet on this Macintosh. It has an FTP server included, so we could send programs over ethernet rather than floppies being shuffled around the shop. It worked great, but Strippit re-imaged the Macintosh during a service call last year. Since then, I have been unable to get ethernet working again. So, we've been using floppies since.

First Question: Is there any trick to getting TCP/IP working in System 7.5.3? I seem to have it enabled and I assigned the computer an IP, but I can't ping it. I also have no way (that I know of) of pinging some other machine from the Macintosh. Is there maybe an extension disabled? What would be the name of it?

Second Question: I need Stuffit for this vintage of Macinstosh. If anyone can point me to a copy that will install from a floppy disk, that would be helpful. Please note that I would have to put it on a floppy from a Windows machine, so it would have to be installable from a DOS formatted floppy. The Power Mac can read DOS disks, but I don't know if things can be installed from such a disk.

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The Power Mac 7200/120 is what came with the Strippit, and what's officially supported. As you can imagine, finding decent examples of this model is getting difficult. I would like to have some spares around ready to be swapped in. I have a 7200/90 and 7300/180 which should be usable. Both are currently running 7.5.x and I actually have install media for each computer (7.5.2 and 7.5.5). Currently, these computers are running a stock OS install after I fiddled with them. However, getting them to talk to the Strippit isn't quite working right.

The Strippit communicates with the Mac over a serial link plugged into the 7200's modem port and a full-length PCI card. The PCI card portion seems to work fine. The serial does not.

Question Three: Is there somewhere in OS 7.5 that specifies the parameters of the serial ports? One has a telephone/modem icon on the back, and one has a printer icon. How the hell does the OS determine which port is which? Does COM1-like nomenclature exist in this old Mac OS world?

Question Four: Suppose I just decided to make an image of the 7200/120's (7.5.3) hard drive. I imagine it would restore to the 7200/90 without any problem since minimum OS on the /90 is 7.5.2. But what about the 7300/180? Its minimum OS is 7.5.5. If I put a lesser version on that machine, would it just run in a degraded way, or not at all?

Question Five: Before I (re-)invest in some USB to SCSI adapters, is there any reason why something like Acronis True Image wouldn't be able to backup and restore these machines? I don't know if the filesystem on 7.5.x is significantly different than the current Mac OS filesystem. Is there a better utility for this task? I have Mac OS X computers if that has better tools available.

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Thanks in advance. We also have a Strippit 1000/20 XP which uses a Windows 95 computer as its control. As you can imagine, getting any of this stuff done on that computer is a piece of cake. I wish we just had two of those rather than this silly Mac.