Problems with ISC SLIP and their reply: It don't work well.

[Larry Snyder]

bgi at stiatl.salestech.com (Brad Isley) writes:


>>What port is SLIP running on? We don't support SLIP running on anything
>>but our standard asy ports.
>>		 ***

>Why is this not documented?  Imagine the load on a system running SLIP on
>a builtin port running 38400 bps or even 19200 bps.  I even called and
>asked if SLIP was supported on intelligent multiport boards and the
>answer was, "Yes."  I even went as far as asking, "Can I use it as a gateway?"
>Same answer.  Sorry - don't ask who I talked to.  I don't remember.

We've run SLIP on both a Digiboard 8i and a dumb ASY port with a
16550AFN at speeds of 38400.  Throughput on the Digi is higher
than the ASY port.

Throughput averages around 1780 cps running UUCP over SLIP using
v.32bis modems.

>modems could figure that out.  I was wrong.  2)  Default route
>mysteriously disappearing from the table.  This one I think was
>due to SLIP coming up and down.  A few minutes after adding the
>route it will disappear.  Add it again and it stays.

yep - we've noticed this when bringing SLIP up and down - thank
goodness we don't go up and down all day long!

>All NFS daemons and some other TCP daemons crash with timeouts if the sldial
>& slattach aren't running when slip is ifconfig'd.  This requires a reboot to
>make the system stable.  Switching to runlevel 2 and back up to 3 after
>dialing sets the stage for a crash.

yes - for sure

We are planning on moving over to Dell SVR4 3.0 when it is released
for our primary gateway.  Dell is constantly working on the product -
and their 2.01 release is quite solid.

The ability to support multiple concurrent SLIP connections is 
quite appealing

-- 
      Larry Snyder, NSTAR Public Access Unix 219-289-0287/317-251-7391
                         HST/PEP/V.32/v.32bis/v.42bis 
                        regional UUCP mapping coordinator 
               {larry at nstar.rn.com, ..!uunet!nstar.rn.com!larry}