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<H1><A NAME="SECTION006100000">Communication Software for Modem Links</A></H1>
<A NAME="serialsoftware"></A>
There are a number of communication packages available for . Many
of them are <em>terminal programs</em> which allow a user to dial into
another computer as if she was sitting in front of a simple terminal.
The traditional terminal program for is kermit. It is,
however, somewhat Spartan. There are more comfortable programs
available that support a dictionary of telephone numbers, script languages
for calling and logging into remote computer systems, etc. One of them
is minicom, which is close to some terminal programs former
DOS users might be accustomed to. There are also X-based communications
packages, e.g. seyon.
<P>
Also, a number of -based BBS packages are available for people
that want to run a bulletin board system. Some of these packages can be
found at sunsite.unc.edu in /pub/Linux/system/Network.
<P>
Apart from terminal programs, there is also software that uses a serial
link non-interactively to transport data to or from your computer. The
advantage of this technique is that it takes much less time to download
a few dozen kilobytes automatically, than it might take you to read your
mail on-line in some mailbox and browse a bulletin board for interesting
articles. On the other hand, this requires more disk storage because of
the loads of useless information you usually get.
<P>
The epitome of this sort of communications software is UUCP. It is a
program suite that copies files from one host to another, executes
programs on a remote host, etc. It is frequently used to transport mail
or news in private networks. Ian Taylor's UUCP package, which also runs
under , is described in the following chapter. Other
non-interactive communication software is, for example, used throughout
Fidonet. Ports of Fidonet applications like ifmail are also
available.
<P>
SLIP, the serial line Internet protocol, is somewhat in-between,
allowing both interactive and non-interactive use. Many people
use SLIP to dial up their campus network or some other sort of
public SLIP server to run FTP sessions, etc. SLIP may however also
be used over permanent or semi-permanent connections for LAN-to-LAN
coupling, although this is really only interesting with ISDN.
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<P><ADDRESS>
<I>Andrew Anderson <BR>
Thu Mar 7 23:22:06 EST 1996</I>
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