USENIX Board Studies UUCP

[News system owner ID]

peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
< In article <16645 at nuchat.UUCP> steve at nuchat.UUCP (Steve Nuchia) writes:
< > This seesm to me to be the obvious way to go.
< 
< As someone else mentioned to me, "You're making sense, that's the problem".
< A dial-up SLIP-type protocol is just too logical (hopefully with packet-
< level CRC and header compression).

This would be a Good Way to do things, as long as you have an _eight_
bit clear channel to speak through.

 "Now let's see... I want to go out through my MNP-5 modem, which is
 locked at high speed, but my Unix box is too stupid to understand
 hardware flow control, so I have to use XON/XOFF (darn).  I'll be
 talking to their MNP-5 dial in modem, which is hooked up to a Micom
 port selector, which is in turn hooked to an Annex PAD, talking only
 telnet to their system, which doesn't understand the 8-bit option to
 telnet (darn, a 7-bit channel), and there's that stupid telnet escape
 character, not to mention the modem escape sequence.  But I still want
 to exchange news with them..."

(No, this isn't an invented scenerio -- it describes comming from the
outside world to one of many machines on the Ohio State U. main
campus.  I know -- I wired up that Annex)

The problem is that if you go SLIP (or PPP) only, you will discover
the same problem all those ZMODEM users have -- I can't get from here
to there (ZMODEM copes with XON/XOFF fine, but can't deal well with
random escape characters or 7-bit channels).

Perhaps we should start with an extension of PPP that can degrade down
to 6 1/2 bit clean, very short packets, if needed, but is more
efficient on a wider channel.

		-- Paul Placeway <pplaceway at bbn.com>