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Many a slip on an Internet trip

Arman Danesh

IT WAS not as easy as I thought.

I have been an Internet user for years. I even feel safe in saying I have been a power Internet user for years.

After all, I can find out the amount of coffee in a pot at a university campus in Britain.

Most people do not know how to do that unless they have sacrificed a great deal of sleep surfing the Net.

''User'' is the key word, however. I have been just a user. I understand the underlying principles of the Internet and can navigate my way through the intricacies of a UNIX filing system. But a system administrator I am not.

This reality hit home recently when I tried to help a friend, another Internet and UNIX user, to set up a server on the Net.

He needed to set up all the tools: gophers, ftp servers, ftp clients, WWW servers. This was a complete Internet node on a nice new Sun box all from scratch.

I figured I knew where to find all the software and I basically knew where the final executable applications should go. But, the thing is, in UNIX, when you download a new application you get source code in C.

You have to compile the application yourself. After all, no single UNIX environment resembles any other. Things are not as simple as in the world of MS-DOS.

Okay, I thought. That is not so bad. I know how to invoke your basic C compiler.

Of course, it was not so easy. I am still trying to get Gopher to work - have not moved beyond that point yet.

It is depressing. After all, I have set up what amounts to really complex Windows Internet-connect boxes with PC-NFS, SLIP, Winsock, and everything else including Windows-based World Wide Web servers, Gopher clients, ftp servers and clients and much more.

I have configured Mosaic on Windows, something I have not even given thought to doing on my friend's UNIX box.

After all, compiling an application the size of Mosaic is frightening.

This all highlights the wonders of a great little API (application programmer's interface) for Windows called Windows Sockets.

Anybody who offers some form of TCP/IP connectivity for Windows probably offers a windows socket dynamic link library (dll).

In this way, developers have been able to write single applications which adhere to the Winsock standards and are therefore instantly compatible with any TCP/IP connectivity solution.

All this means that the applications can easily be configured and I can get a full Internet node up and running in an afternoon.

The machine will even be able to accept incoming ftp and telnet if I want it to and it can act as a WWW server for the burgeoning Mosaic and Web community.

While Microsoft's Windows is not the ideal operating environment for high-end networking, it has become an incredible success at the individual-level. While no one would want to consider setting up a high-end node with high-volume access using a Winsock-based server, it is a great place for a beginner to become a proficient practitioner of the Internet and truly knowledgeable about the different protocols sending data around the net.

Of course this elicits thoughts of SLIP, which is one of the greatest things to hit the scene for the individual Internet user.

For a long time, a user who was not working directly on a terminal on a Net-connected network had to use a dial-up UNIX account for access to the Net.

Of course, this limited users to the basic command line tools and forced them to work on a shared machine with a shared CPU and shared storage resources.

SLIP, which stands for Serial Line Internet Protocol, on the other hand, allows a machine connected to the Net by a telephone line to be a full node with its own IP address while it is connected to the Net.

All clients run locally and it is even possible to run servers locally and offer access to the outside Internet world while connected over a phone line.

SLIP and Winsock together provide a workable shareware-based solution for individual full-node access to the Net and, in Hong Kong, where there are no per-minute telephone charges for local telephone calls, this is affordable.

Call up your local SLIP provider and leave the connection open for 24 hours if you want to and you could become the next great World Wide Web site on the net.

Or offer the ultimate ftp archive. Or, perhaps, provide information about Hong Kong by Gopher. But, do not tell your service provider I suggested it when their phone lines get clogged by 24-hour SLIP users.

I never mentioned it.

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