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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!usc!sdd.hp.com!network.ucsd.edu!qualcom.qualcomm.com!servo.qualcomm.com!karn From: karn@servo.qualcomm.com (Phil Karn) Subject: Re: [386BSD] Message-ID: <1992Sep13.060959.26409@qualcomm.com> Sender: news@qualcomm.com Nntp-Posting-Host: servo.qualcomm.com Organization: Qualcomm, Inc References: <p5tullo@sgi.sgi.com> <Btr5F5.AJ9@pix.com> Date: Sun, 13 Sep 1992 06:09:59 GMT Lines: 64 In article <Btr5F5.AJ9@pix.com> stripes@pix.com (Josh Osborne) writes: >But I don't think 386BSD _currently_ has support for PPP, or AX.25 (and >there may be a few other things 386BSD doesn't have), also NOS seems to >lose way fewer charactors at high speeds. Hopefully we can fix all that, >but for the moment "NOS is not needed" isn't quite true... I may be somewhat biased, but I agree. :-) I am at this moment using NOS as a demand-dialed IP router between my home Ethernet and a Netblazer at work. It supports a 386BSD machine and a DOS machine on the Ethernet side and a Codex 3260 V.fast (24.0 Kb/s) modem on the serial line side. It is really quite nice to have a separate, dedicated machine doing the SLIP routing, especially while I'm still struggling with my BSD stability problems. Those old stripped 286s that aren't good for much of anything else these days make great dedicated routers, especially for SLIP lines where they can offload all those character interrupts. (Remember when we all used to use Vaxes and Suns running 4.2BSD as IP routers in our company networks? That didn't keep Cisco, Wellfleet and Proteon from building successful businesses.) I began NOS in late 1985 to bring multitasking TCP/IP and its basic applications to hardware that the average ham (or student) could afford. (It actually began on a dare, when Terry Fox, WB4JFI, a rabid CCITT/X.25 supporter, insisted that TCP was so monstrous that it wasn't possible to implement it on anything less than a big VAX. I've since discovered that the best way to get me to do something is to insist that it is impossible.) Given MS-DOS's popularity (like it or not) I've succeeded - technically. But there are still many hams who are daunted by NOS's (and TCP/IP's) relative complexity. So it's still a minority player in the amateur packet world, which is still dominated by the "dumb terminal and BBS" model that was state of the art in, oh, 1979 or so. C'est la vie. You can lead a horse to water, and all that. Now given that a typical UNIX system is several orders of magnitude more complex than NOS and TCP/IP, I fear it'll be a long time before the average ham will have his own 386BSD system (or whatever succeeds it.) The cost of the software or even the hardware is no longer the limiting factor. It's now the user's ability to deal with what he perceives as overwhelming complexity. Face it, those of us who really know how to configure, operate and maintain a networked BSD UNIX system are still rare enough to be in high demand even in a recession. But I do hope that there will eventually be at least one ham capable and willing to provide a UNIX or 386BSD server system in most ham packet communities. The rest can use NOS to access it, once they figure it out, of course. Some people do seem to be trying to turn NOS into another UNIX lookalike this by (re)implementing large and complex applications, many of which are already well supported in BSD, like netnews, sendmail and named. That was never my intention. Now that 386BSD is finally out, the fancy applications can go where they belong and NOS can do what it does best: supporting dedicated or specialized applications like routing and AX.25, and serving as a relatively low-overhead platform for protocol experimentation. I know that for amateur packet radio at least, 386BSD and NOS are a highly complementary pair. I'm very excited about the possibilities, but the hardware/software costs and technical problems are the least of our worries. Phil