[11271] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Socks? Term? Explain please.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)
Sun Mar 27 22:35:07 1994
To: Paul Robinson <PAUL@tdr.com>
Cc: Everyone Lurking on Com-Priv <com-priv@psi.com>
In-Reply-To: [11224] in Com - Priv
Date: Sun, 27 Mar 94 01:46:02 EST
From: Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU>
(I don't know what socks is, but its probably similar -derek) Term is
a stream multiplexer, which can be used to multiplex many TCP streams
over a dialup link. This means that you can use it to multiplex
multiple terminal sessions, X sessions, do file transfers, TCP
redirection, and a lot of other neat things.
I use it from home every day (until I get real IP), and I tend to run
some apps locally on my machine, and some apps remotely. The local
apps only need to use the link for data I/O, whereas the remote apps
need to actually do X protocol over a 14.4 modem, which can be
disappointingly slow if the link is doing anything else at the time
(like an ftp). Term comes with a few apps, like a remote shell, tcp
redirect, and file upload.
Also, there are a lot of common-place apps that have been ported to
use term. For example, I have seen term-telnet, term-finger, and, as
I mentioned, term-ftp.
In addition, I've ported some of the Athena apps to use term. In
particular, I ported Kerberos and Discuss, so I can get kerberos
tickets on my linux box at home (over the term connection), and then
use those tickets to encrypt an rlogin session to another machine, or
to authenticate to discuss servers. Also, by running these apps
local, screen refreshes are much quicker, since the only network
(serial) data is the actual text of the messages that I want to read,
as opposed to the overhead of the X protocol to draw it on my screen.
Quite convenient, and much, much quicker!
I hope this helps explain term...
It would be much nicer if I had real IP, since right now I am kind of
lying about my IP address, using the address of the term server, and
also I can only fake TCP data, not UDP data, which means that I can't
access filesystems, zephyr, or any of the other UDP services.
If you have more questions, let me know.
-derek
Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, G MIT Media Laboratory
Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB)
Home page: http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/warlord/home_page.html
warlord@MIT.EDU PP-ASEL N1NWH PGP key available
