apratt@atari.UUCP (04/01/87)
Not all kermits are created equal, or, indeed, compatible. Atari ST owners know this, because the Kermit they got doesn't always talk to other kermits correctly (specifically, the "finish" and "bye" commands aren't the same: the ST hangs up waiting for the host to say, "I finished"). Some "standard" kermit should be used. It should be a LIMITED kermit, because the most complex ones I have seen have commands like "execute an arbitrary shell command on the remote machine." But the worst problem with Kermit is bandwidth. With a maximum packet size of 94 data characters, it has an unreasonable amount of overhead in packet headers/trailers, especially on a good connection where errors rarely happen (and therefore packet retransmission rarely happens). With 5-10% packet overhead figured into the transmission time, phone bills go up. I don't know what the overhead is for uucp. These are just some thoughts for discussion, not a flame on Kermit or the idea of something besides uucp for intermachine file transfer. /----------------------------------------------\ | Opinions expressed above do not necessarily | -- Allan Pratt, Atari Corp. | reflect those of Atari Corp. or anyone else. | ...lll-lcc!atari!apratt \----------------------------------------------/