From: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Subject: Re: (C)SLIP Date: 3 Jan 1993 18:49:52 GMT
wto@cbnewsg.cb.att.com (William T. O Connell) writes:
>Is anybody using (C)SLIP -or- know where to get it for linux?
>If not, is there anybody working on this? (if so, I would be
>willing to act as a test site -or- try to help 8-) ).
There are two separate SLIPs. One is the ALPHA version that you
noticed. It works with the kernel-based TCP code. The other is KA9Q.
This is a user-mode implementation, which does not depend upon
anything in the kernel (except support for the serial port, of
course). KA9Q performs well and is stable, but (1) supports fewer
services (primarily FTP, client telnet, and X) (2) everything is done
through a single program, so you can't have different applications
running in different windows. (The exception is the X support.) It
supports Van Jacobson header compression, i.e. CSLIP. The telnet
should be fairly good (probably better than the typical versions
supplied with Unix implementations). Its user interface is modelled
after Cisco's terminal servers (which are themselves modelled after
the TOPS-20 "tn"). It reacts to ^S, ^Q, ^C and ^O locally (if your
telnetd implements the necessary telnet options -- many do not).
Other facilities are of lower quality (roughly proportional to how
often I use them). It's in tsx-11 binaries/usr.bin/ka9qbin.7.tar.Z
with source in source/usr.bin/ka9qsrc.7.tar.Z. Installation
instructions are with the binary. (If you're using anything older
than 7, you should upgrade, as 7 fixes a serious bug with header
compression, and implements mget and mput in FTP.) Various people
have made other features work, such as incoming telnet and some kind
of mail support, but I haven't had to time integrate them into my
copy, which is what's on tsx-11.
I don't know much about the kernel implementation of SLIP, but from
the author's comments in the mailing list, it doesn't sound like it's
stable yet. It doesn't do header compression. However it would give
you access to the full set of networking utilities.