lloyd@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu (Lloyd W. Taylor) (08/16/90)
owen@raven.phys.washington.edu (Russell Owen) writes: >InterCon Systems Corp. 703-709-9890, offers a commercial product which >reads news, handles mail, and has ftp and telnet. It's called TCP/Connect >II, and lists for $500. We're considering buying it. Does anybody have any >experience with it? It seem very expensive, but if it's well written maybe >it'd be worth the cost. We use TCP/Connect II quite heavily here (somewhere around 100 Macs here are so equipped), and are quite pleased with it. It's grown quite a bit since it's initial incarnation as NCSA Telnet. (Trivia note: Gaige Paulsen, who now works for InterCon, was one of the authors of NCSA Telnet way back when in his undergrad days.) They've added alot of functionality, and really cleaned up the code. The basic terminal emulation functions support vt52/102/241, Tektronix, and IBM3278-n protocols. Missing, but planned for a future release, is IBM3179 color graphics support. (My favorite trick to demonstrate its power to the IBM types around here is to cut and paste between simultaneous MVS, VM, Unix, VMS, and Mac windows. That usually gets their attention!) FTP is supported, in both client and server modes. The server modes can be configured to off, secure (userid/password required), anonymous (with optional folder restrictions), and promiscuous (anything goes!). The client mode uses a Font/DA Mover style dialog, allowing you to point and click to transfer files from most remote hosts (including MVS and VM hosts equipped with appropriate ethernet hardware). Personally, I use the "delete" button on the FTP Client dialog to deal with my files on the local VM host, rather than trying to remember the wierd "dirm" and "filel" commands on VM itself! The News menu allows you to connect to an arbitrary number of news servers (one at a time), and keeps a separate active file for each one. It presents the user with a very nice point and click interface into the available news. It also has a powerful regexp capability for subject and author parsing. (You can turn my postings blue, autodelete someone else's, etc.) "rn-style" power keys are supported, so that you died-in-the-wool Unix types won't have to learn to use a mouse :-). Mail is nicely implemented, and comes with a simple POP2 server daemon for your local Unix mailserver. We were unable to get the supplied server to work on our Ultrix 3.1 system, but had no trouble using the TCP/Connect client with another PD POP server. One can send a file to another TCP/Connect user, and the file will be uuencoded, split to files small enough to make it through your mail system, recombined at the far end, and uudecoded back to a binary file. Reply and forward commands are available, as is a "refile" command to store your mail on the local mac disk. There is a built-in client for some sort of mail user nameserver (I think it's the "ph" server), but we haven't looked into that. Configuration is via a Control Panel style interface. Because of the many capabilities of the package, it can be complex, and not for the novice Mac user. We keep a basic configuration file on one of the local Appleshare servers so that our new users can just take our defaults for most things, and be up and running quickly. Documentation is good, but sparse. You'll need to have someone around who can explain some of the networking stuff that the manual assumes you know. There are a few rough edges. For example, starting up the News client for the first time on a full-feed server can hang your mac, as the poor application runs out of memory trying to build the active file. Just make the partition about 4 megs the first time you try it to solve this. After the first time, you can reset it to a 1 Meg partition. In general, telephone customer support is quite good, although email support has been somewhat sporadic. Their customer support address is via uunet, and mail sometimes appears to get lost. Sending the same message a couple of times generally gets a response, and often a fix. There are substantial discounts for large quantity orders, and (I believe) you can buy only the pieces of functionality you want. If you don't need IBM emulation, you can reduce your cost by not buying that part. Bottom line: it's a very good product, and the next release should be excellent. There's alot of power packed into this package. -- Lloyd Taylor Telecomm/Networking Manager Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. Laurel, Maryland, USA