This HOWTO attempts to clear up some of the confusion of using
TERM, Michael O'Reilly's remarkable program that allows you
to multiplex your serial line and set up a network connection.
By and large, the documents that come with TERM are quite
good, and this HOWTO is not intended to replace them. The intention of
this document is to give some background on how TERM works
and detail the steps in getting some of the more common networking
services working under TERM. It should be emphasized that this
document does not cover everything there is to know about
TERM. After reading it, the TERM
manual pages should be read, since they include information not contained here.
TERM?TERM is a program, written by Michael O'Reilly
(michael@iinet.com.au) and maintained by Bill Riemers (bcr@physics.purdue.edu), that is run over a serial line to allow
multiple connections to operate concurrently - i.e. you may
be down-load a file via your modem while working on a (different)
remote system via the same modem connection. TERM can also
be used to open up X client windows over a serial connection. Through
the tredir utility and the tudpredir utility TERM can provide almost all of the
``traditional'' TCP/IP and UDP network services: mail, news, ftp, telnet, xarchie, etc. In a
sense, TERM is very much like other serial protocols such
as SLIP or PPP. TERM's advantage is that it can be run
entirely from user space, requiring no support
from system or network administrators.
Unlike SLIP or PPP, your machine does not have its own IP address. All incoming traffic must be addressed to your remote host, and it will be redirected to your local computer by TERM.