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[previous article] [next article]As you may know, the ECN has three Kinetics Ethernet/Appletalk gateway boxes installed between three Appletalk networks and the ECN network. These boxes provide a high speed, direct connection between MacIntoshes and any of the various ECN machines. Two new pieces of software are now available to use this connection for terminal traffic and high speed file transfer.
The first is a terminal emulator and ftp server produced by the National SuperComputer Applications center at the University of Illinois. This program uses the Kinetics box to establish a connection from a MacIntosh to any of the machines on the campus network which understands the TELNET terminal protocol. That includes all of the ECN and PUCC UNIX systems.
The terminal portion of this program emulates a VT100 terminal and allows for up to 15 simultaneous connections to one or several machines. The terminal emulator also supports a limited set of Tektronix 4010 graphics commands. It can display the output of local utilities, such as qplot and plot3d, but is unable to work correctly with DI-3000 applications and the tc, troff previewer.
While running, the program also accepts connections from the "ftp" file transfer program. This program can be used to transfer both ASCII files and binary files between MacIntoshes and UNIX machines. Connections are made from the UNIX machine to the MacIntosh. File transfer speeds are roughly 20 times those of macget over a directly connected serial line. A 200 Kbyte file can be transferred in about 30 seconds.
A MacWrite file, detailing the usage of this program in greater detail, is available with the software.
The MacIP package comes from Stanford University; the same folks who wrote the gateway software we are using in our Kinetics boxes. This package features three programs, a finger program similar to the finger command on UNIX, a "telnet" terminal emulator and an "ftp" file transfer program. In addition, Stanford has included a pre-release version of their next version of MacIP which combines the above three programs into a single integrated program.
The integrated program, MacIP 2.0, allows for up to five terminal connections, a finger, and a file transfer to take place at the same time. The terminal connections emulate a VT100 terminal and feature recording of lines off the top of the screen as well as saving selected portions of the terminal section into files. The file transfer program features an interface similar to that provided by the Font/DA Mover utility, listing files on the MacIntosh and remote system in file selection boxes. The file transfer feature is quite robust and has been used to move files across the country on the ARPAnet.
Fingering someone to find out if they are logged in to a UNIX machine is easy too. Selecting finger from the menu gives you a dialog box in which you type in the person's login name and the machine he usually uses. A scrolling window displays the answer obtained about this person from the machine you queried.
As the MacIntosh networking environment continues to grow, we expect more of these sophisticated tools to become available.
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