Re: Term software development/design

[Mark <mark@coombs.anu.edu.au>]

Those of you with a 386 or greater and over 40Mb Hd (most of the
pc's these days are usable) might want to take a look at running
linux/386bsd/netbsd at home and then running term(1). It's a
program with it's own packetising, compression of data (which is
good for a quick and nasty anti-tap system) and you can telnet, 
rsh, ftp, finger etc all from the unix command line of your home
machine. Uploads etc can all be done at the same time as you read
mail on a remote host.

the lastest version is term107.tar.z and should be avaliable from
most archie sites. It has #defs for suns, nexts, hps, linux etc.
When i find the guy who wrote the telnet client for it I'll probably
add des encryption to it.

The above is for plain modem usage, it's a semi tcp link at home and
you can dial anywhere and link up in seconds, no special system file
changes, just compile the remote binary and you're away. If you're
just using the dialup host as a bouncer then all that is running is
one innocuous looking binary, even though you might have several
ftp's and telnets etc running at once. Honestly it's an admins
nightmare.

Linux etc also has slip and inet options if you want to explore
those. The only problems I find are people being unable to listen
(usefully) to your sessions and killing the line :)

Most of the tools are written I find, all thats needed is the adding
of encryption to them for a totally secure session. No need to write
another term program, just use whats out there.

Mark
mark@coombs.anu.edu.au