30 TIA
Description
This article is from the Amiga Networking FAQ, by Richard Norman with numerous contributions by others.
30 TIA
What is TIA and Mlink, and are they useful to an Amiga User?
TIA ==> The Internet Adapter (TM)
by Cyberspace Development, Inc. (CSD).
marketplace.com
It is a commercial software product that enables shell account users to have partial SLIP access to the Internet without paying the extra monthly surcharge of having a full SLIP account, and without having to have an Internet address. Since TIA runs on the service providers host, Amiga users can take advantage of it too.
Although the service provider misses out on some revenue, they also miss out on a lot of management headaches from SLIP. Check with your service provider to see if TIA or Mlink is endorsed.
The drawback to TIA is that you don't have your own internet address, and therefore no one can telnet or FTP to your machine. This does not stop you from running Mosaic or FTP *OUT*. Just the incoming is unavailable. In other words you can act only as a client not a server.
Another drawback is that you still have to have SLIP on the Amiga side. TIA basically sets up a software gateway that speaks SLIP to your Amiga over the serial port of the host, and TCP/IP over the host's ethernet card. TIA doesn't allow the AmiTCP packets to pass directly to the Internet therefore your machine has no address as far as the Internet is concerned. The Internet only sees the service host. TIA makes the service host make TCP/IP requests on your behalf and then passes you back the results. This does not work for some TCP/IP utilities such as ping. Think of it as layers or stacks the data must filter through with TIA as a middleman or translator.
|====< AMIGA >====| |====< Service Host >======|
| AMosaic | | TIA <====GW====> TCP/IP |
| AmiTCP | |your Shell Account || |
| SLIP | | | || |
| serial port | | serial ethernet|
|====|---|========| |===|---|===========|++++|=|
| | ||
modem<--serial line-->modem || ethernet LAN
||
Internet & WWW
There are well written docs available on line from CSD that explain TIA much better. You can FTP them from marketplace.com. You can also use gopher and Mosaic to the same site.
Mlink is available on Aminet and performs a similar function as TIA. It allows you to use a cheaper shell account to access the Internet, but just like TIA it is a one way glass: you can see out, but no one can see in.
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