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From: montnaro@sprite.steinmetz (Skip Montanaro)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Interactive SMTP over phone lines
Message-ID: <5962@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 11-May-87 09:03:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: steinmet.5962
Posted: Mon May 11 09:03:58 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 16-May-87 02:57:27 EDT
References: <16608@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Sender: root@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP
Reply-To: steinmetz!sprite!montnaro (Skip Montanaro)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 30
Keywords: smtp sendmail SLIP

In article <16608@amdcad.AMD.COM> bandy@amdcad.AMD.COM (Andy Beals) writes:
>Interactive smtp is nice but you need to have an error-free datastream
>between them.  So, anyone for writing a point-to-point dialup tcp/ip?

Isn't that what SLIP (Serial Line IP) is supposed to do? (Maybe not TCP, but
at least IP.) It is my (perhaps mistaken) understanding that SLIP was used
to connect the research machines at Berkeley before Ethernet was available.
I'm not sure if SLIP is still distributed with any Berkeley distributions,
although it is still around (I've seen references to it on the net). It is
still vaguely referred to in the bk(4) man page (at least on SunOS 3.2):

     This line discipline provides  a  replacement  for  the  tty
     driver tty(4) when high speed output to and especially input
     from another machine is to be transmitted over an  asynchro-
     nous  communications  line.  The discipline was designed for
     use by a (now obsolete) store-and-forward local network run-
     ning over serial lines.

My question is:

     With SLIP in place, how difficult would it be to plop TCP and SMTP on
     top of it? Can SLIP be run over dialups or just point-to-point
     connections? (I've always thought it would be nice to run my backups
     using SLIP over a modem line to the network at work when (and if) I get
     a Sun at home. Just dial up, get the server to NFS mount my disk, and
     dump away. :-) ).
-- 
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