2 Introduction

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 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.