Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att-cb!att-ih!pacbell!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!VAX.FTP.COM!stev
From: stev@VAX.FTP.COM (Stev Knowles)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: SLIP
Message-ID: <8804022042.AA27139@vax.ftp.com>
Date: 2 Apr 88 20:42:52 GMT
Sender: uucp@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 29


slip is an acronym fo Serial Line Internet Protocol. yes, one can even
run IP over a lowly serial line. this does have it's useful aspects.
this allows geographicaly disjoint LANS to have direct routing across
between all the machine on all the lans. when you are connected
properly, routing can be used to allow you to connect from your
machine (the client) to any machine the gateway knows how to find. i
run a slip line to a C-gateway at MIT (my internet link) and on an 
in-house machine for testing or our commercial inplementation. slip is
useful for a limited amount of things. it will not replace a real
network connection (*trust me*). we see *real world* throughput of
80-85 percent of the line speed. this isnt bad, but an ethernet or
Pronet10 is a much better connection. i have been told about people
seeing 97 percent line troughput, with no data compression. (both of
these figures are for *data*, not *packets*) seems to me that this
does not leave enough space for the headers, but i dont remember all
of the numbers now.

ok, slip is good for connecting machines (or, better yet, networks) on
diffrent campuses, or getting one machine along way from a everyone
else on to the network. but it wont work very well for a local network.
(am i confused, or didnt DECNet (*gasp*) run on serial lines when it
first camme out?)


excuse me, i ramble. corrections to the above are welcome, flames can
be flushed.

stev knowles