Introduction

About This Document

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 an ersatz network connection. By and large, the documents that come with term are quite good, and this HOWTO is not intended to replace them. The intent 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. I should emphasize that this document doesn't cover everything there is to know about term. After reading it, you should read the term manpages, since they include information not contained here.

What is term?

term is a program, written by Michael O'Reilly (michael@iinet.com.au), that is run over a serial line to allow multiple connections to operate concurrently - i.e. you can be downloading a file over 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, term can provide many of the ``traditional'' network services: mail, news, ftp, telnet, 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 neither kernel support nor support from system or network administrators.