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SLiRP Project Needs Maintainer

Posted by Cliff on from the orphaned-project-seeks-owner dept.

Karl A. Krueger hopes someone might be interested in following up on this bit of info: "SLiRP is a program by Daniel Gasparovski which lets you emulate a SLIP or PPP connection over a shell dial-up connection. In other words, it's a PPP "driver" that runs entirely as a user process. Unfortunately the last official release was in 1996, and the author is apparently no longer interested in maintaining it. The license is somewhere between BSD (requires attribution) and GPL (requires freedom). I've made a few minor fixes to it so that it compiles and runs under a modern system (Debian 2.1 -- should work under others as well) but there's quite a bit that could be done with it if someone wanted to actually maintain the thing. Anyone interested? In any event, my patched version is here. "

5 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Linux 2.4 and SLiRP by jpranevich · · Score: 5

    Hello,

    One of the new features getting ready for 2.4 is the so called "generic" PPP layer. This is a generic implementation of PPP which supports both modem and ISDN connections and possibly others, I'm not sure. What I'd be curious in knowing is whether it would be easy to make a module for 2.4 that exports the kernel PPP code / pppd into a nice file stream such as used by SLiRP in PPP mode. This would effectively allow Linux machines "internal" SLiRP without any additional cost. Why? I don't know.

    This would not however resolve the number one reason for using SLiRP (or, at least the only reason I've ever used it): shell accounts. Most ISPs or places where you would have non-PPP shell accounts would not typically be running Linux and especially would not likely be running a recent kernel. So, there is most definately a continuing need for SLiRP but would a lot of changes and "maintenance" be needed in SLiRP to reach that goal of legacy support? I don't know that either.

    So, does anyone know if the Linux 2.3/2.4 ppp layer can be munged in this manner? That could be so much fun... :)

    Joe

  2. SLiRP in India (and other developing countries ? ) by Doodhwala · · Score: 3

    Ummm....really don't know how many people from India read Slashdot but had a thought...

    SLiRP could be used on a shell account in the USA (as far as I know Slirp does support telnet connections...though a bit fussy about it) in combination with a cheap shell account from VSNL (local ISP in India), a TCP/IP acc could be simulated. A bit slow but definitely worth the price ($10 for 500 hours..compared to a lot more for a TCP/IP )


    Two things to note... A service called SenseNET used to provide something like this. Don't know if they used SLiRP/TiA or something else. Plus VSNL (and some other ISPs) do not provide clean 8 bit telnets (or I simply did not experiment enough with it). People might need to fiddle around with that.

  3. SLiRP: Shockingly Relevant After All These Years by Effugas · · Score: 4

    Twas a few weeks ago at work, whence I was determining how to solve a raft of remote access problems. Nothing was working, deadlines were coming...and then I remembered SLiRP. Oh my.

    SLiRP is alot more valuable than you might think. For one thing, it provides a user-level NAT'd IP connection over any terminal link. Note, not just a modem link, but *anything*. Combined with SSH, SLiRP makes for an insanely slick VPN routable link that just *works*.

    Even for dialup lines, SLiRP rocks. *Absolutely* no administrative headache getting an IP range in which to run PPP. No headaches at all.

    I think you need to try to get ASPPP to work on Solaris to truly understand how painful PPP can be. Even pppd isn't too nice on Solaris. But slirp? Thunk. Work. First try.

    I'm not just blowing smoke. At my work, there's a semi-decent chance we'll be deploying SLiRP *all over the place*, at *huge* companies, very soon, for precisely these reasons. It's fast, it's free, and it's astoundingly functional.

    My shock at seeing my recently rediscovered PPP app of old up on Slashdot again is quite unnerving, but I can't complain. SLiRP has done me well.

    One thing I'd request, if anybody's working on adding features--could somebody port in the MS-DNS code? I'm eventually going to be doing *alot* of GPL work involving SLiRP, but my stuff will end up much more high level.

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com


    Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.

  4. heh by danjo · · Score: 5

    wow... :) Those were the days... hacking 'till 4am to get the load-balancing code to work (I only had one modem and my tester, whom I talked to on IRC (hey Ducati916!) lived in Salt Lake City), getting tons of email every day (got up to around 80-100 per day at one stage), job offers, etc. etc. Some great memories. Gosh I'm a nerd. :)

    It's good to see it still being used... please do email me if you have any questions on the code or anything... I wish I had the time to keep maintaining it.

    Let me just clear one thing up: I see "isn't interested in maintaining it..." everywhere, which is false... I did have a 1.1 release scheduled as the "final" release with some bugfixes and some cool new functions, but I lost them in a HD crash. Then I entered the RealWorld. etc. etc.

    Ahh, memories... Thanks for brightening up my (really shitty up to now) day... :)

    Danny Gasparovski
    dgs@ficsgrp.com

  5. SLiRP Maintainer by strredwolf · · Score: 4
    I use this myself, and would definetly love to see some patches and upgrades for it. Therefore, I declare myself SLiRP's Maintainer. Please send your patches to tygris+slirp@erols.com, and I'll see about applying them to the base stock. Hopefully, I'll have a page up at http://www.erols.com/tygris/slirp for everyone's edification.



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