everything concerning SLIP seems to be out of date

[Robert Watson]

On Sat, 1 Jan 2005, [utf-8] Björn König wrote:

> I wanted to use SLIP to connect two machines with a null-modem cable,
> but I realize that all information concerning this topic seems to be out
> of date. First of all the device sl0 doesn't exist in 5.3 although there
> is a "device sl" in sys/i386/conf/GENERIC for Kernel SLIP. The manpage
> of sl contains at least one gross error: the synopsis is obsolete.
> slattach(8) refers to uustat(1), but uustat(1) doesn't exist. Chapter
> 21.7 of the handbook is absolutly useless in conjunction with
> 5.3-RELEASE. 
> 
> Does these things have a background or a specific reason? Is there an
> easy alternative? Was SLIP declared as obsolete but someone forgot to
> document it? 

FYI, I had a report in September that SLIP was working for Yar Tikhiy
after he fixed a TTY-related bug.  However, it's a rapidly dating
protocol.  It's on my list of network components to test, but the fact
that the documentation is slipping is not surprising since most of the
world has moved to PPP.  It's on my list of things to test and update
sometime in the next couple of months once Poul-Henning's TTY work has
settled a bit in 6.x. 

Were you actually able to get SLIP to work, or were the technical
obstacles too great?  I'll correct the uustat(1) reference now, and I can
go take a more detailed look at SLIP if it is actually broken (but given
Yar's e-mail, my belief is that it works).  I would generally recommend
using PPP in preference to SLIP, since it's widely used whereas SLIP seems
to have been almost completely abandoned by users once PPP became
available. 

Robert N M Watson