Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mstar!mstar.morningstar.com!bob From: bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.misc Subject: Re: SLIP: Why are people so reluctant to use it? Message-ID: Date: 17 Oct 90 19:28:28 GMT References: <1990Oct16.225610.3505@oracle.com> <1990Oct17.133028.14849@bnrgate.bnr.ca> Sender: usenet@MorningStar.COM (USENET Administrator) Reply-To: bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) Distribution: na Organization: Morning Star Technologies Lines: 34 In-Reply-To: pww@bnr.ca's message of 17 Oct 90 13:30:28 GMT In article <1990Oct17.133028.14849@bnrgate.bnr.ca> pww@bnr.ca (Peter Whittaker) writes: In article <1990Oct16.225610.3505@oracle.com> tslee@oracle.uucp (Terry Lee) writes: However, it seems that everyone I ask about SLIP seems to speak ill of it... is SLIP all that bad? Are there other relatively standard methods of running TCP without sizable investments in hardware? Yes, SLIP was all that bad, at least by modern standards (as usual, it was an inspired wonder in its time!). It was a first cut, and as noted, quick and dirty and hard to manage. The second cut included compressed headers and so then at least provided more reasonable performance. But most of the problems remained, and that's OK, because they showed what needed to be done when serial line IP was done Right, From Scratch again: Note: the Internet community is apparently working on the PPP (Point-to-Point protocol) as a way of curing some SLIP headaches. Anyone know PPP's status? PPP is standardized in RFC1171, with initial configuration options in RFC1172. A Sun implementation is available from omnigate.clarkson.edu:pub/sun/ppp.tar.Z, and a KA9Q implementation from ucdavis.ucdavis.edu:dist/ppp/*. Others, of various ancestry and heritage, are available from CMU (parent of the UCDavis KA9Q stuff, I think) and Hawaii, though I can't point directly to them offhand. (Brad Clements wrote that Sun stuff for the 386i. Karl Fox ported it to SPARC under SunOS 4.0.3 and will share his changes with folks who ask, via mail. I don't know whether it's been ported to SunOS 4.1 yet.) Unless you have a dire need for backward compatibility, you shouldn't be bothering with SLIP in this day and age, particularly not Classic SLIP without header compression. New installations should use PPP.