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Unix Operating Systems Software

SLiRP Project Needs Maintainer 70

Posted by Cliff from the orphaned-project-seeks-owner dept.
Karl A. Krueger hopes someone might be interested in following up on this bit of info: "SLiRP is a program by Daniel Gasparovski which lets you emulate a SLIP or PPP connection over a shell dial-up connection. In other words, it's a PPP "driver" that runs entirely as a user process. Unfortunately the last official release was in 1996, and the author is apparently no longer interested in maintaining it. The license is somewhere between BSD (requires attribution) and GPL (requires freedom). I've made a few minor fixes to it so that it compiles and runs under a modern system (Debian 2.1 -- should work under others as well) but there's quite a bit that could be done with it if someone wanted to actually maintain the thing. Anyone interested? In any event, my patched version is here. "
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SLiRP Project Needs Maintainer More

SLiRP Project Needs Maintainer

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  • Oh yeah. I forgot that I eventually modified the script to run under Windows' dialup networking, using the scripting feature under 95. Always struck me as kinda funny, dialing up to the freenet, using lynx, etc., without ever actually 'seeing' it being used (as there was the option to suppress text in the script).
  • Linux could already do this via IP Masquerade. (Yes, it not only works for LANs but over PPP too.)

    The only problem with this is, of course, you need the omnipotent root to set it up. With SLiRP, you don't, which IMO the only thing that makes it beneficial compared to IP Masq.
  • I remember having to put wording into my old ISPs AUP to prevent use of this little darling...
    Of course, it you shell into a FBSD box, you can just use ppp -direct, and not bother with this little program...

  • Re:heh (Score:1)

    by mwa ( 26272 )
    My Hero!

    People laugh at me because I still use slirp with my primary ISP. I started using it (my first open source software) when they were charging a $50+ setup for ppp acccounts. Then, I realized slirp is keeping people out of my machine. Not only did I get ppp for the price of a shell account, but I got an instant firewall too! I'm still "grandfathered" on my ISP as a shell account, since they no longer provide them. (I couldn't manage without telnetting in to get my mail.)

    So, now I got an ISDN connection (through work). Took me 3 days to get a reasonable firewall setup, and I still can't get my second NIC to give up IRQ 3 for the modem. Slirp saved me time, money, and peace of mind for many years.

    Thank you, Danny!

  • A year or so ago my ISP at the time, which is located in the OTHER major metropolitan area of California, decided to drop its service to silicon valley - leaving me in the lurch just as I was moving across the bay anyhow.

    So I installed a copy of SLiRP on my netcom shell account, and used that for network connectivity until a couple months ago - when I finally got an ADSL link. I still use it as a backup for when Pack Bell dies on me.

    My mail exchanger has always been separate from my ISP, reached via UUCP polling. (This lets me change ISPs without losing mail connectivity.) The mail server has two entries for it in the Systems file, the first one trying (twice!) to make a UUCP-over-IP connection if the net is up. The second dials up the exchanger via modem if the first fails and the modem is free. In the days when my network connection was also via phone - either to the fly-by-night ISP or the SLiRP hack, it used the same modem - after I tweaked my PPP install to use the same locking scheme. If the net was up, it used it in the background. If it had dropped, it made the call. All automagic. (I have an alias that forces a poll if I want to be sure something goes out right away or check for mail without waiting for the next poll.)

    Now when on the road I can call into the same modem from any phone, picking up and dropping off mail (again via UUCP-over-IP-over-PPP) in parallel with tweaking the home network or doing a quick surf. (Who needs POP and fetchmail?)

    If I ever decide to save a few bucks and downgrade from "enhanced" to "basic" DSL, SLiRP is one way to let my whole net of machines masquerade as a single host on the one IP number.

    So these "obsolete" protocols aren't really so obsolete.

  • I'm a sys admin/manager for a community college in Delaware (er, the only one!). We use slirp extensively. Why on earth for?

    7 years ago, we got 20 dial-in analog lines for our userbase of 255 CIS students. Now we have 16,000 students (all students get e-mail now of course, not just CIS), but still have 20 lines.

    Why? The college doesn't want to get into the ISP business. It's expensive and most students have ISP accounts of their own anyway. It's a decision I supported 100%.

    But there's always the poorer students who gets screwed by policies like this. So we maintain shell access for those students to get their e-mail and -- if they can figure it out -- allow them to use SLiRP to get something approaching a PPP line.

    We put up a web page [dtcc.edu] explaining the steps in getting it to work, but specify that we don't support it. This way, the student who isn't burdened with a lot of cash but has half a brain can get equal access to the net at no cost.

    So far, policy works fine. Most students use their own ISP, and our 20 lines don't get maxed out, but most of those that DO use it, are running slirp.

    It'd be nice to see it maintained. I've seen cases where it drops the last byte of an FTP transfer and haven't been able to figure out why, for example. (We run DG/UX boxes here, might be an OS compatability issue... Also, DG/UX doesn't have a pppd that will work on a non-serial connection, ruling out that...)

    Now the next slirp question I'm sure to hear is -- can it be hacked to work with Dreamcast? Beings I just bought one this morning and my first analysis of it -- answer is no. Doesn't seem to support a connection script... just PAP or CHAP I suppose... :-(

  • I'm the SysAdmin for the machine that hosts the "Official" SLiRP homepage at http://blitzen.canberra.edu.au/slirp/. Looking through the logs reveals that people are indeed still downloading it, despite it being several years since a proper release. Something on the order of 200 to 400 FTP downloads of SLiRP related stuff a week, and 2000 to 3500 hits on the SLiRP related web pages a week.

    I can probably continue to provide hosting for SLiRP should anyone choose to continue development.

  • Re:slirp maintainer (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hello,

    I have been maintaining slirp since mid 1998 on an odd-fix basis.
    The current version is 1.0g and it contains some fixes compared to 1.0c
    that should not be lost. See the changelog on

    http://smith.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/~vdb128/slirp .

    I am a conservative maintainer and do not have the time to implement
    new flashy features. I urge every patch-submitter to verify the changes made
    and, if thought acceptable, to verify them again. I will check the newest
    changes in a month or so.

    A new maintainer should now that this may take more time than initially
    bargained for. For the new maintainer: notify me if

    1. you're serious
    2. if the changes from 1.0c --> 1.0g are merged.

    Sincerely,
    vdb128@tele.kotnet.org

  • Additional SLIRP Virtues (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ok, lots of posts but I haven't seen my two
    favorite related slirp virtues.

    1) Security. Slirp does *NOT* forward arbitrary
    packets back down your phone line for you
    to deal with using your firewall setup. If
    you don't configure incoming connections, there
    won't be any. Plus if someone portscans the
    other end of the TCP connection, they will be
    portscanning the server system.

    I've never really felt as safe with PPP+
    firewall as I did running slirp.

    2) Anonymity. Sort of. All connections look like
    they are coming from the server machine. (I
    guess if they run ident the jig would be up).

    -- cary
  • I wrote/maintained the FAQ for the alt.dcom.slip-emulators usenet group for
    awhile - it's been included in the release
    of slirp for eons -and hasn't been updated
    for just as long.

    Slirp maybe one of the first Open Source
    projects that helped put a company out of
    business! TIA, "The Internet Adapter" has
    been mentioned here a few times already.
    TIA initially did Slip only, and would have
    PPP Real soon now. Slirp came on the scene,
    and was working pretty well after a couple
    releases. We complained to Dan about PPP,and
    a clever programmer in Finland(lots of those
    around here ;-) adapted the then current PPP
    driver from Linux to Slirp! TIA didn't have
    it for several months after that - at which
    point they were probably too late. Slirp
    just acquired a working PPP driver in a
    period of a few weeks!

    Ah the memories ;-)

    Steve Wilson
  • Is there some remotely constructive way of getting this off your chest?

    I have no idea what you are complaining about, and the tone of your post makes you look a lot worse than the guy you're flaming.

    Try counting to 10 before posting.
  • I remember how it was, I'm sure you all do too
    I thought I was so cool bumming a 14.4 K free "Internet connection" of a shell account from school.

    Oh well, those were the days...

    Now we have 56K ISP connections at ~ $5 - $10, decent ADSL connections ~ $3.0

    Reminiscing ..
  • My gut reaction, since I have a love for old hardware and software, was this must be preserved! but as I thought about it a little more, I don't know if there really is any reason for this anymore. Dialup internet access is extraordinarily cheap, and I don't think any ISPs in town distinguish between shell access and SLIP/PPP access anymore. Then I thought about whether or not this would be a good thing for someone like me - has a DSL line but would like to dial in through the modem sometimes.. and, frankly, there isn't much use there either. I could always set up real PPP, or plain old shell access, or set up a menu to switch between them upon connection.

    So, who does have a use for this?

  • Linux 2.4 and SLiRP (Score:5)

    by jpranevich ( 15801 ) on Wednesday September 08, 1999 @04:26PM (#1694052) Homepage
    Hello,

    One of the new features getting ready for 2.4 is the so called "generic" PPP layer. This is a generic implementation of PPP which supports both modem and ISDN connections and possibly others, I'm not sure. What I'd be curious in knowing is whether it would be easy to make a module for 2.4 that exports the kernel PPP code / pppd into a nice file stream such as used by SLiRP in PPP mode. This would effectively allow Linux machines "internal" SLiRP without any additional cost. Why? I don't know.

    This would not however resolve the number one reason for using SLiRP (or, at least the only reason I've ever used it): shell accounts. Most ISPs or places where you would have non-PPP shell accounts would not typically be running Linux and especially would not likely be running a recent kernel. So, there is most definately a continuing need for SLiRP but would a lot of changes and "maintenance" be needed in SLiRP to reach that goal of legacy support? I don't know that either.

    So, does anyone know if the Linux 2.3/2.4 ppp layer can be munged in this manner? That could be so much fun... :)

    Joe
  • thats $30 for an ADSL connection, NOT $3.00 (give it another 5 years)

    - HEEHEE
  • Now-a-days, PPP accounts are easier to come by than shells. The only time I would want SLiRP any more is for NAT, and ip-masq does that much better.

    I guess I wouldn't mind seeing it maintained just for sheer historical coolness, but most people (myself included) would rather work on a more useful project. And of course, maintaining a package without a userbase is a little hard (no bug reports!)

  • I remember using this program with my first graphically capable internet connection. It was great, but thank god for my current T1 connection. =) I would be willing to help out with maintaining the project, but I don't have to time to take it on by myself.
  • One could use slirp via telnet on an existing PPP or ethernet connection to make two distinc networks appear to be local to your slirp host.
  • Oh man! I used this neat program back in my college days (1995+). Man, I think I was the first one to discover this program and use it on my university shell account while Internet was new over there. Eventually the firewall came along. DOH!

    Anyone remember TIA? Another SLIP emulator I believe.
  • Not really. There are better ways to do this, more securely. VPN mini-HOWTO [ssc.com] is a good start.

  • A use for slirp: Palm Pilots & PDAs. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have some patches to slirp so it'll work nicely with my WorkPad / Palm III. No special NAT setup on the Solaris box at work; no special privileges required. It just goes for most things. Walking up to some box and hooking up a laptop or a PDA with no special permissions or setup can be a good and wonderfully useful thing. No one here was interested in it, though. Odd.

    What'd be really nice: A signed Java applet that can access the serial port (the comm api, but I'm not sure how it interacts with signatures / applets), uses ppp to talk to the device, and then sets up a secure tunnel to a remote site. Then an appropriate web browser and a serial port could make a mostly secure VPN link for PDAs. (The serial port can be sniffed easily. A better solution would source the encrypted tunnel from within the PDA, but this is better than nothing.)

    Jason, ejr@cs.berkeley.edu

  • I agree!!!!!!! I was one of the pioneers for my small university. Hehe! I remember using Kali to play multiplayer games!

    At first, I used SLIP, then PPP.
  • I first used it years ago, with a shell account on a certain national provider. I still have that shell account, every once in a while I find a use for it, just enough that I haven't dumped it yet. Mostly telnetting in and doing traceroutes and the like. But when I went on vacation to Hawaii earlier this year and decided I wanted to stay in touch via email, I realized I could do it, with my PalmPilot, Palm modem, said shell account, 800 number to said shell account ($8/hr from Hawaii), and SLiRP! I even still had SLiRP all set up to go. It was great, worked flawlessly. Granted, if I had to get a new account to do it, I would have just gotten a PPP account, but having the shell account anyway, SLiRP was a perfect solution.

    SLiRP was the last in a string of programs of that sort that I used regularly. The first was DNet on the Amiga. Man was that ever a hack! But it worked really well within it's limits. After I started running NetBSD on that Amiga, and when I first moved to Linux, it was Term for a short time until SLiRP appeared.
  • That little matchhead sized web server, iPic [umass.edu] that's been featured on slashdot several times, was for a while connected to the net through a Digital Unix box running SLiRP. Looks like it has a normal SLIP connection now, but there's another modern use for you.

  • SLiRP in India (and other developing countries ? ) (Score:3)

    by Doodhwala ( 13342 ) on Wednesday September 08, 1999 @05:13PM (#1694064) Homepage
    Ummm....really don't know how many people from India read Slashdot but had a thought...

    SLiRP could be used on a shell account in the USA (as far as I know Slirp does support telnet connections...though a bit fussy about it) in combination with a cheap shell account from VSNL (local ISP in India), a TCP/IP acc could be simulated. A bit slow but definitely worth the price ($10 for 500 hours..compared to a lot more for a TCP/IP )


    Two things to note... A service called SenseNET used to provide something like this. Don't know if they used SLiRP/TiA or something else. Plus VSNL (and some other ISPs) do not provide clean 8 bit telnets (or I simply did not experiment enough with it). People might need to fiddle around with that.
  • Yeah, I think TIA costed $20 U.S. money for life-time if I remember correctly. :)

    I bought and used TIA before I discovered Slirp.
  • It's simple.... Some of you are saying that use of this is dead. I can log onto a computer right now that probably has 30-40 slirp sessions running on it. College students are poor, or arn't allowed to get a cable/dsl modem in the doors/apartments they live in. And with some universities allowing free dialup servers like the one I goto, it is a valid solution. Granted its not gonna smoke but for the casual user that can always walk to a computer lab to do anything real, it works fine.
    Is it a valid solution for most people no, mainly because we want to do more than look at a couple of simple web pages and reply to e-mails. I know now that I have a cable modem I couldn't ever go back to dialup. But for those that don't have the option slirp is a valid solution.
  • I use something like this already except my ISP calls it
    a dynamic-shell account. I dial in and connect like any
    other user but then I'm able to telnet to the server.

    I find it extremely useful. I can check news and e-mail
    before downloading it and trash any unwanted messages.
    In addition, I can set up procmail filters if I ever
    really need to. I can also edit my html on the server
    rather than having to ftp any changes. All this and
    no additional charge per month.

    On the downside of this is that you now have another
    account that can be cracked. Though this isn't too
    bad because my ISP knows what its doing when it comes
    to security.

    I definitely have to say that I'm glad I have my
    account.

    Sol
  • OK how does one tell if kimchi IS spoiled?
    --
  • Back when PPP accounts were expensive GA Tech signed some ridiculous contract with a service provider (MCI, I think) such that PPP would be provided to students for a small fee + per minute charges over some fixed amount of time.

    That doesn't sound so bad until you get to 1999 where the price of an unlimited access PPP account is lower than the base fee with that ISP. The problem is that you can't just get by with any old ISP's account since there are a lot of servers and databases here which lock out users based on IP address.(Lexis/Nexis in particular).

    SLiRP to the rescue! Although the contract prevents GA Tech from setting up a competing PPP dialin service, it's perfectly fine for them to provide a free TTY dialin line, which they've done. Now, thanks to the magic of SLiRP, I not only have unlimited PPP access from within the gatech.edu domain, but I don't even have to pay the slimy ISP's per minute fees.

    --Ben
  • When I signed up with world.std.com for my first post-compuserve ISP (in 1993ish), they only offered SLiRP through shell accounts and did not offer "real" SLIP or PPP access. Last time I used them (start of 1999) they still recommended that users use SLiRP instead of real PPP. std.com runs a kick ass SGI multiprocessor. Their web server is still NCSA. Perhaps they would be willing to at least help find a maintainer.

    In 5 years, I never noticed any problems with SLiRP. Many thanks to the creator(s).

    Bravery, Kindness, Clarity, Honesty, Compassion, Generosity

  • SLiRP works over X.25 packet nets (eg Tymnet), which are still in wide use. Does PPP? (I dunno).

    I've routinely used this to access the 'net -- local dialup to Tymnet or equivalent, X.25 connection to my "ISP" (not its primary role, but it offers a SLiRP connection) across the country, and then IP from there.

    Still some life in the old software yet, I think.
  • US West is a *fine* ISP, and the connection I see at my friend's place in Minneapolis is great, but the $18 is only good if you're willing to buy a $15/mo. phone package to get a few bucks knocked off the price of their ISP service. If you sign up from their website, they don't explain that you can get Internet access from an ISP other than USWEST.NET.

    * The Minneapolis/St. Paul area has a simplex cable system, so uploads must be done via modem if you have cable, which gives DSL a (regional) advantage.

    * DSL gives you several more choices. You can use the local Bell or at least one certified CLEC such as Covad. There are tons of ISP's also waiting for independent thinkers to use their services.

    * It may not (always) be as fast or cheap to use 256k DSL, you can get some added value, like a static IP, or a subnet of 8 IP's at a reasonable rate (not $10/ea., more like $20 for eight.). The package that seems most interesting is $25/mo. with a static IP, 20 hours of dialup when I'm away from home, and two email addresses. The rates for addon packages are much more reasonable.

    * The "snoop" policies that the @Home network was going to implement/did implement are just plain uncool -- it's not ISP's business to see what websites I'm visiting, especially if I can't opt out. If you don't have @Home cable, then you're probably using RoadRunner (Time Warner) or MediaOne(formerly US West), but where's your choice?

    The ring/star topology arguments are bunk, of course... I've never seen bottlenecks related to anything other than the backbone of your ISP, even though peak hours slow down cable at two points instead of one.

    If you can get cable, and they offer the kinds of features you want, go ahead and get it -- if you need a better set of features, you'll find them on DSL.

  • SLiRP: Shockingly Relevant After All These Years (Score:4)

    by Effugas ( 2378 ) on Wednesday September 08, 1999 @05:29PM (#1694076) Homepage
    Twas a few weeks ago at work, whence I was determining how to solve a raft of remote access problems. Nothing was working, deadlines were coming...and then I remembered SLiRP. Oh my.

    SLiRP is alot more valuable than you might think. For one thing, it provides a user-level NAT'd IP connection over any terminal link. Note, not just a modem link, but *anything*. Combined with SSH, SLiRP makes for an insanely slick VPN routable link that just *works*.

    Even for dialup lines, SLiRP rocks. *Absolutely* no administrative headache getting an IP range in which to run PPP. No headaches at all.

    I think you need to try to get ASPPP to work on Solaris to truly understand how painful PPP can be. Even pppd isn't too nice on Solaris. But slirp? Thunk. Work. First try.

    I'm not just blowing smoke. At my work, there's a semi-decent chance we'll be deploying SLiRP *all over the place*, at *huge* companies, very soon, for precisely these reasons. It's fast, it's free, and it's astoundingly functional.

    My shock at seeing my recently rediscovered PPP app of old up on Slashdot again is quite unnerving, but I can't complain. SLiRP has done me well.

    One thing I'd request, if anybody's working on adding features--could somebody port in the MS-DNS code? I'm eventually going to be doing *alot* of GPL work involving SLiRP, but my stuff will end up much more high level.

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com [doxpara.com]


    Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.

  • Why I use slirp today (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    slirp serves a useful purpose to me even today.

    I have a couple of guest shell accounts at the university where, as a college student, I worked at the computer center and CS dept. This university has a terrific library with some online databases that my present institution doesn't have. Access to these databases is via HTTP and restricted to IP addresses within the university.

    So, what do I do?

    Using ssh, I slirp up a secure ppp connection to my guest shell account. In fact I have my gateway machine (cable modem/masquerade/10-100 bridge) at home establish and maintain this connection (over my cable modem) automatically. Sort of like a poor man's vpn. It's all seamless. Packets destined for the library and a few other machines at that university always get routed over the slirp connection, which is reestablished if it's down. (This isn't surreptitious, btw.; the folks who let me have my guest account know and don't have a problem with it, so the connection is up almost always anyway -- no pesky delay when I connect to those cuspy online databases...)

    I use the same trick to access resources at my graduate institution and even at my current (postdoctoral) institution (which of course doesn't recognize my cable modem address). But I don't need slirp in those cases, since I have root access to linux boxes at both places; I simply set up masquerading for my host. Same principle, though.

    slirp works for me, in the limited application I have for it....

  • Which is a bit less.

    I remember my 110/300 baud modem. And how I envied those spoiled college kids with their 1200 baud modems.

  • A year ago I envyed someone with a modem.

    Now I love my ADSL.

    DIGITAL THEATRE NEWS [dtheatre.com]
    -------------------------------------------
  • Gosh, those were the days. Slirp, Navigator 2.0, Windows 3.1, my 486DX-66, and a 14.4k modem. Oh baby. Slirp was an awesome tool in the pre-ppp days, but is there even an isp out there now that doesn't offer PPP? slirp was a tool created just for getting around shell accounts. I can't think of any use for it now. It is a cool hack, so a copy should certainly be preserved, but I see no reason to keep it up to date.
  • I'm a moron. Using it as a VPN tool is a great idea. I'm planning to do it now. :) Keep the nostalgia from my last message, but disregard the criticism. By all means, maintain it and keep it up to date. Cable modem comes in soon, and I'd love access to the interior of my university.

    ------------

  • Re:heh (Score:1)

    by cherub ( 9120 )
    those were equally great days for me. i was in high school, using slirp to turn my (free, of course) unix shell account into a full-fledged slip account, staying up until 4am (ah, that magic hour!) hacking away on LPMOO inheritance code or whatever it was i was doing at the time. that, my friend, was the proverbial day.
  • Wow.


    I have a lot of history with Slirp. I remember just having a lowly Unix account at the local university, and building Slirp so I could finally use that Netscape thingy. It was the first program I ever compiled.


    Yeah those were the days.


    ---------------

  • Is there any way to encapsulate SLiRP(and PPPD) within a 7 bit channel? I tried something along the lines of uudecode | slirp | uuencode, but it (obviously) didn't function as desired.

    Suggestions? I have a feeling a standard 7 bit stdin/stdout wrapper might be useful all over the place.

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com



    Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.
  • Back when my alma mater started charging $10 a month for PPP service, and simultaneously changed the shell to a 7-bit service. They quietly avoided the subject when asked if they changed it to break SLiRP.

    J.
  • http://www.phoneboy.com/slirp/, which is useful for those who are trying to run SLiRP with a Mac. Granted, I haven't added anything to this page in quite a while, but I keep it up there for people that need it. I still get an email or two about it every so often and, at least in the past month, the page got ~900 hits.

    I was going to write a page for Win9x a while ago, but it's one of those things that seemed to use relevance once PPP accounts were plentiful and shell accounts were few. It's really nice to see that people are still using it.

    -- PhoneBoy
  • Can you give me more info on how you set this up? I'm in a similar situation: my university does IP checking for it's news server and I need to access university newsgroups. Ever since I got DSL, I've had to use my shell on a university account. This sounds like it's just what i need!

    If you can, can you email me too? jyc2@uclink4.berkeley.edu
  • I would have thought it was preserved there.

    Besides, a few years back, I looked into it...and heard that every ISP person I knew of would defenestrate you if you used it, since it apparently *ate* system cycles and resources.

    I did find something I thought was better...and won an award from PC Mag in 95 or 96 - SLIPKnot,
    which was a WinDoze-based graphical interface to lynx, that used that, and zmodem, to work the same as any other graphical web browser, from a shell account.

    mark
  • I used SLiRP to get a SLIP connection to home back in 1992-93 or something. (Dialled up to a shell with my 2400bps modem..) I can still remember the feeling of using all TCP/IP software home without the hassles of first downloading files to my account and then downloading them home with Ymodem etc..

    Nowadays I have a cable modem at home and I hook up my old computers as terminals to the serial ports of my NetBSD box. It's still the easiest way of networking old boxes with only a parallel or serial cable.

    230Kbps is still fast enough for most 'surfing' if some friends visit and wants to be on-line the same time as I am.

    I think SLiRP is quite useful for many others too who want to utilize their old boxes without spending more time (and money) on hubs, cables and ethernet cards and configuring interfaces than the old boxes are worth.
  • Con:

    For modem dial-up, it's pretty simple to use RFC1918 addresses and IP Masquerade. Last time I used it, it didn't support a lot of things (ICMP, typical reverse-connection stuff like DCC send). You lose some performance running over 7-bit ascii transports.

    Pro:

    There's some pretty good NAT code out there now. It outght to be possible to borrow some of that to fix some protocols that don't work. It's nice sometimes nice to pic up you connection from a machine you're not directly dialed into. As mentioned in other replies, one can combine this with SSH to make a handy VPN. It appears to be less platform specific, so is easier to port.

  • heh (Score:5)

    by danjo ( 89361 ) on Wednesday September 08, 1999 @08:02PM (#1694096)
    wow... :) Those were the days... hacking 'till 4am to get the load-balancing code to work (I only had one modem and my tester, whom I talked to on IRC (hey Ducati916!) lived in Salt Lake City), getting tons of email every day (got up to around 80-100 per day at one stage), job offers, etc. etc. Some great memories. Gosh I'm a nerd. :)

    It's good to see it still being used... please do email me if you have any questions on the code or anything... I wish I had the time to keep maintaining it.

    Let me just clear one thing up: I see "isn't interested in maintaining it..." everywhere, which is false... I did have a 1.1 release scheduled as the "final" release with some bugfixes and some cool new functions, but I lost them in a HD crash. Then I entered the RealWorld. etc. etc.

    Ahh, memories... Thanks for brightening up my (really shitty up to now) day... :)

    Danny Gasparovski
    dgs@ficsgrp.com
  • Just a small note (it's been awhile) - but as I recall, you could set up a mask so that SLiRP would work properly over a connection that was not 8-bit clean. I don't remember the parameter off the top of my head but it isn't difficult.

    SEAL

  • SLiRP Maintainer (Score:4)

    by strredwolf ( 532 ) on Wednesday September 08, 1999 @11:35PM (#1694098) Homepage Journal
    I use this myself, and would definetly love to see some patches and upgrades for it. Therefore, I declare myself SLiRP's Maintainer. Please send your patches to tygris+slirp@erols.com, and I'll see about applying them to the base stock. Hopefully, I'll have a page up at http://www.erols.com/tygris/slirp [erols.com] for everyone's edification.



    ---
    Spammed? Click here [sputum.com] for free slack on how to fight it!

  • I nearly pulled off a hack once, but could never get it to work fully. Had/have a freenet acct w/ no shell. However, it has lynx, and thus, I used lynx to telnet/rlogin into my remote shell, and run slirp from there. Wrote a script in Commo (speaking of old software!) to automate it all.

    I managed to get it to work, partially -- I could access things via IP, but not DNS, and still couldn't get it to work after rtfm.

    Incidentally, unless I missed it, I don't think I've heard anyone mention the fact that you could do load-balancing with SLiRP, if you ran it across two modems. I always thought that was damn cool, even if I never had the chance to test it out.
  • Yeah, I found SLiRP after someone told me that TIA was pay-software or something. Is this true?

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