Hi,

I've been playing with another approach to getting networking of sorts
onto ELKS. I just remembered that in the early days of Linux, there was a
package called term, which provided networking across a serial link using
a shell login without IP or root privilege. The idea is that after logging
onto the remote host, one runs a proxy program to talk to the serial
link. On the local side one runs programs that have been linked to a
special library, one that intercepts all the usual networking system calls
and turns them into requests to the remote proxy. Term even could sidestep
characters that would be swallowed by the serial link. In this way all
network requests appear to come from the remote host. In this way people
were able to run termified versions of the usual networking applications.
After SLIP and PPP access became widespread, term slipped into obscurity.

I obtained term-2.3.5 and hacked it to compile under bcc. I have got
it to make the termnet.a library, which is the replacement library for
networking functions. Unfortunately the test program doesn't compile due
to a compiler bug. I also found that ELKS misses a set of good header
files, even if the libraries don't exist yet.

Anyway, as I don't have a good ELKS setup, if someone wants to play with
the source, I've put it at:

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/9247/term-2.3.5-elks.tar.gz

The original is at metalabs.unc.edu.au (ex sunsite) under
linux/system/network/serial

        Ken

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