Setting up a SLIP connection on NetBSD/mac68k

Motivation

SLIP stands for "serial line ip" and is a simple way of encapsulating ip packets on a serial line. The serial connection has to be 8 Bit clean.

Unlike the more advanced PPP, SLIP does nothing more than providing an IP link. Everything else in the lifecycle of an IP connection - serial communications setup, routing, DNS setup, authentication, bringing up and pulling down the link - is out of the scope of SLIP, and has to be done manually.

While PPP has replaced SLIP in dynamic, dial-up scenarios, SLIP remains a simple and lean alternative in memory-constrained setups where you control both ends of the link, like NetBSD install kernels, or embedded systems.

Server side

The SLIP server needs to provide a serial interface, (optional) authentication, and routing for the ip link.

Serial link

Probably the easiest way of setting up a serial link is to run getty(8) on the port, and have it hand over the authenticated session to sliplogin:

# /etc/ttys
[...]
# 38k4 slip access, "server" side
tty01  "/usr/libexec/getty std.38400" unknown on  local dtrcts

Here, local disables modem control on the line, and dtrcts is a mac68k peculiarity: So-called "hardware handshake" serial cables connect the DTR and HsKo pins, which gives you either modem control (DTR), or flow control (RTS) in hardware.

slip login account member of group "dialer"; no need for an entry in /etc/shells

slip getty setup no modem control, hardware handshake

Bringing up an IP connection

sliplogin(8) looks at /etc/sliphome/slip.hosts to identify the remote system.

# loginname	local-address	remote-address	netmask		opt-args

Sslip01		`hostname`	slip01		255.255.255.255	link0	link2

Here, the opt-args are link[0-2]. These are switches which change link-level interface behaviour, and should be documented in the sl(4) manpage but are not yet. OpenBSD has just updated their sl(4) manpage (thanks to Marc for the pointer :).

• link0 - Compress TCP traffic
• link1 - Suppress ICMP traffic
• link2 - Auto-enable TCP compression if initiated by remote end

The content of /etc/sliphome

IP Routing

Unless you want to set up a routing daemon for the slip connection the easiest possibility is proxy arp. This means that you have the slip server advertise the ip address on the slip interface under the MAC address of its ethernet LAN interface by having the /etc/sliphome.slip.login script create a manual arp(1) entry.

Make sure that the arp entry gets removed properly after terminating the connection (see /etc/sliphome/slip.logout).

Client side

Discuss slipconnect.sh content.

Serial link

Bringing up an IP connection

IP routing

Resolving hostnames

Connection Lifecycle

References