Jose A. Amador wrote: > I almost always used JNOS with KISS interfaces, it is a natural way of > using it. TNC's under MSDOS, and also thru pipes under Linux with > net2kiss (I would have to go back to the manual to remember a few > details). It could be interfaced with the BPQ switch, so FBB, JNOS, the > BPQ switch could share the same KISS TNC. >
Lot's of discussion, planning, and work has gone on in this area in the ALE space. The short version is with AX.25 packet, the session & link layers are already taken care of. KISS is just a way to communicate with the TNC and assumes the existence of AX.25 type link layers. With other HF protocols those layers sometimes have equivalents, but not defined as such and never in a form that can be directly leveraged in JNOS. Even devices like the SCS P3 modems have had to bridge this gap with supplementary commands, etc. So you can't just implement a KISS interface and magically have a new mode working with JNOS. I still think KISS is the right approach for portability, but there is lot's of design work needed to add the additional layers. Same for "we'll just use TCP/IP".... way too much overhead in the protocol, and it does not respond well to HF reality. Timing and retries just will not work on HF. lot's of mil/gov research in this area. SMTP is very "chatty", with almost a dozen back & forth exchanges to send a message. There are some HF tuned SMTP equivalents, but they really do not add any value over some of the approaches currently in use in the ham world. Which brings us to...... Regarding FBB interface, Patrick is right, it's the defacto standard, well understood, and even implemented inside the WL2K systems. It's also the model we used for BBSLink & ALE. The challenge on HF is that interactive bbs type chat's are extremely inefficient, especially with low bandwidth protocols. To the point that many HF BBS's now discourage interactive sessions. So for BBSLink we went with a very compressed approach. Same general command set as FBB, but in a form that you can initiate a message with subject line in a single line of text, followed by the body of the message in subsequent lines if it's a multi-line message. BBSLink then translates to the session "chat" needed with the gateway system, be it FBB, MSYS, WL2k, or SMTP. This allows us to interface with pretty much any of the major bbs/email gateways. Right now most of the work is with WL2K & SMTP message domains, but there is no reason the SMTP host could not be a NOS session coresident on the same box. Or an MSYS style FBB box. If you examine bbslink commands, you'll see the exact FBB commands: SP (send private), RM, LM, etc For several reasons we did not emulate the full forwarding syntax of the BBS world, as it really starts to increase the scope as you get into "store & forward". Once you accept a message, you own it, including communicating failure back to the initiating session. Big responsibility. So by design bbslink is stateless. The message handoff either succeeds immediately, or it fails. And the initiating station knows either way. It's the only safe way, as there is no guarantee that you will ever be able to reach the sending station again if the message fails, etc. We also chose not to duplicate existing messaging infrastructure. Instead, we decided to focus on leveraging the 3 most common messaging gateways encountered in the ham world. (SMTP, WL2K, F6FBB/W0RLI) Doing so bridges networks, rather than fragmenting the amateur community further. Common message systems are a big win, separate ones slowly die. (Genie, AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, teletext, etc) So if you want compatibility with NOS/MSYS, etc, that is already working in the ALE world. You don't need KISS, it's done at the session layer using TCP/IP and direct socket based transfers. SMTP is the most prevalent, whether the "big I" Internet or entered into a ham/mars packet system via NOS SMTP gateway. Or even MSYS. You could argue that SMTP is the defacto standard in messaging gateways as pretty much all systems support it in some form. I still owe Patrick documentation on how to interact with bbslink (or emulate entirely) which should help bridge the networks further. The external bbslink interface is documented. I just need to write up the internal interface so multi-psk can be used as transport as well. All of this is good dialog, and worth exploring. It's just sometimes harder to make play than just picking protocols. Have fun, Alan km4ba ------------------------------------ Announce your digital presence via our Interactive Sked Page at http://www.obriensweb.com/sked Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digitalradio/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digitalradio/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:digitalradio-dig...@yahoogroups.com mailto:digitalradio-fullfeatu...@yahoogroups.com <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: digitalradio-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
