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04 TCP-IP




Description

This article is from the Amiga Networking FAQ, by Richard Norman with numerous contributions by others.

04 TCP-IP

TCP-IP is a protocol that has been released as a standard which means that vendors can implement it independently and freely and yet it still works. The standard is defined and described in RFC documents which are available electronically. Lots of free source code and the ability to use it royalty free make TCP/IP attractive to vendors. It has been implemented by a large number of different vendors and therefore is popular on the Internet. For more information on the Internet and TCP-IP concepts see ZEN

TCP/IP as the name implies is more than one layer. The IP layer takes care of the lowest layers of the protocol and is responsible for talking to the device drivers (data link layers). The TCP is one of two "transport" layer protocols which handles the packetizing of the data. TCP is a reliable service because it insures that the packets are put back into the right order and that they are all received. If you send packets "a", "b", "c", then TCP will make sure they are received as "abc" and not "bca".

UDP is the other transport protocol and it is unreliable, but has less overhead. The applications ride on these lower protocol layers. There are a number of applications defined in the TCP/IP standards, but vendors are only required to supply the lower layers. See the applications section for a partial list of TCP/IP applications. For instructions on using the FTP application see the FTP FAQ

TCP/IP standard also provides for programming hooks which can use ports and sockets to allow programs to talk to one another over the network. The World Wide Web (WWW) and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) are two examples of how these hooks can be exploited. Any programmer can use these hooks for their own programs.

See the software by category section for a list of Amiga implementations of TCP/IP.

Q) DECnet

DECnet is a proprietary standard belonging to DEC which is also made up layers in a similar manner to TCP/IP. They break up the job quite a bit differently. For instance with DECnet there is no need for a separate NFS application. You can see a remote nodes disk drives by simply including the DECnet node name in the directory command. DECnet has two ways of handling terminal traffic. For the WAN you use the SET host function of DECnet, but it is more efficient for local traffic to use the LAT protocol. The older model DEC terminal servers only supported LAT or asynchronous DECnet. Newer models also support SLIP and PPP (check the manuals) since DEC now makes computers that use TCP/IP as well.

TSSnet DECnet is an Amiga implementation of DECnet.

 

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