Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!geneva.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans Subject: Re: Cisco terminal server Message-ID: Date: 5 Jun 89 01:28:08 GMT References: <3442@ursa-major.SPDCC.COM> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 42 To: dyer@ursa-major.SPDCC.COM rutgers.edu is a major UUCP backbone node. All of its dialup UUCP traffic goes through cisco terminal servers. At one point I implemented a modification to uucpd that would allow you to connect directly to it from the terminal server. This would avoid having a telnetd or rlogind sitting there copying characters. I believe we got this code working but I'm not sure we're using it very much. telnetd uses enough CPU time that I think you might want to consider this approach if you expect to do a lot of traffic. In order to get good UUCP performance, you may want to use the "dispatch-timeout" parameter so that you get reasonably full packets. We use 8 for Trailblazers and 35 for other modems. If you are using telnet, you'll want to configure "telnet-transparent" and probably "escape 0" (which makes BREAK the escape character, rather than ^^ followed by x) for those ports. If you share the ports with normal dialins, you can have people send "term download" as part of the login sequence. This does both telnet transparent and escape 0. It is also the command to allow xmodem to work over telnet connections. That gives an 8-bit transparent connection, if used with a BSD telnetd that doesn't have the CRLF bug that was in early versions of 4.3. (telnet-transparent controls how CR is sent. There are several reasonable interpretations of the specs, so they let you control it. I believe telnet-transparent sends it as CR NUL, whereas the default is CR LF. The problem with the default behavior is not the CR LF, which would be OK, but the fact that they ignore any LF's typed in after a CR.) I assume rlogin would do the right thing as well, though you'd still want to change the escape character I think. You indicate that you're going to run SLIP through this. We use cisco's for SLIP. However there are some limitations, at least in software release 7.1: - SLIP is not designed for use as a router. That is, the system on the other end is assumed to be a single PC, not a gateway to another network. There are several subtle things that this affects. - the MTU is 1500, and can't be changed. - at most 2 packets can be queued for output on any given line at a time. If this is exceeded, packets are dropped, without ICMP source quench. This is reasonable for use in a PC environment, where you will set up a small window size anyway.