Cell Relay Archive

[guru@deltanet.com (Bill Schultz)]

In <Pine.OSF.3.91.950430213043.3500A-100000@einstein.technet.sg>, Cleatus Fernandez <cleatus@technet.sg> writes:
>Hi Netters......
>	I appreciate, if someone can give me a clear distinction 
>between SLIP and PPP...I am getting confusing facts from my local
>vendors......It would further help if you can guide to to some good
>technical materials on the subject......

What you may or may not want is the technical definition of the two
serial standards.  If that is of interest, pull up your favorite web browser,
go to http://ds.internic.net, select AT&T Directory and Database services,
select Internet documentation, select "Request for Comments" documents,
and pull up whatever is of interest to you.

The current standards standard is RFC1720, which lists all of the standards
currently applicable to the Internet.

SLIP is a simple concept: take IP packets and transmit them over a serial
link.  Thus, only RFC1055 deals with SLIP.

PPP is a real protocol, so there are over a dozen RFCs that deal with PPP
in various sorts of physical environments and with various proposed
extenstions to the protocol.  The basic definition is in RFC1661.

The typical layman's view is that SLIP was designed on the back of an
envelope and implemented virtually instantaneously.  All it does is send
IP packets over a serial line; thus the name: Serial Line Internet Protocol.
More information is given in RFC1055.

PPP on the other hand was a serious protocol that attempted to deal with
the multitude of issues that SLIP had not addressed, such as error detection
and correction, compression, etc., and to do so in a way that communicating
computers with different implementations of the protocol could agree on the
lowest common denominator and thereby "get along."  For this reason, all
of the subsequent development work for serial protocols has been directed
at refining and/or extending PPP.

As RFC1055 points out, the real advantage which SLIP has is that it is very
trivial to implement.  This allows a new implementation of whatever to be
up and testing in virtually no time.  Serious users use PPP.  I use PPP.

I hope that this helps you out.

P.S.: to stay a bit on the subject of this newsgroup, I note that the current
definition of PPP over SONET/SDH is RFC1619 but I did not specifically spot
an RFC for PPP over ATM, even though it is defined for several other media.

On the other hand, a SLIP like usage of ATM appears to be defined by
RFC1577, IP and ARP over ATM.

Does anyone know if PPP is one of the encapsulated protocols envisioned
by RFC1483, Multiprotocol Encapsulation over ATM?

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|     Bill Schultz     A Warped Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste.....
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