should SLIP support be removed?

Andy Green andy at warmcat.com
Sat May 20 07:49:58 UTC 2006


Robert P. J. Day wrote:

>> If people are still using slip, possibly we should add that to busybox.
>>
>> What does it _do_?
> 
> Serial Line Internet Protocol.  Does everything that PPP does, except
> worse.

LOL well it does less than PPP, it's simpler and smaller.  Basically 
slattach is a usermode apps that manages / fakes up a link between a 
network interface sl<n>, eg, sl0 and a physical serial port.  The 
logical link is "point to point", that is, there is exactly two IP 
addresses involved, one at each end of the link.  The sl<n> network 
interface is externally told the IP of both ends of the link, and this 
must match at the far end too.

Once you set up the far-end IP as the gateway for your routing, and the 
far end is doing NAT, you have a nice solid serial port -based IP 
network that exposes itself as a standard network interface object, 
sl<n>.  You can tcpdump what is on there, run whatever TCP services, 
wget, etc.

It's not used much but in the multiprocessor case, which is where I am 
using it, it allows you to leverage a boring serial port into the 
Internet in a clean and lean way, at the price of configuration hassle. 
  But for the multiprocessor case the config action is a designtime one-off.

I don't know I would merge it into busybox unless there is more call for 
it than from me, since I made an RPM[1] with slattach, the only thing I 
would hate to happen is if SLIP powers were lost from busybox ifconfig.

-Andy

[1] It's still coming
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