PLIP.DEVICE

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: Release 4
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NAME

PLIP - A Parallel Line IP SANA2 Device Driver

OVERVIEW

PLIP is a network device driver conforming to the SANA2 standard. It allows linking of two Amigas using their parallel ports. Transfer speed is around 40 kbyte/sec. The complete low level transfer protocol is integrated in the device driver, including port arbitration handshaking and interrupt driven reads. Although the transfer process itself is cpu intensive, the device needs no cpu resources when no transfer is in progress.

PLIP is intended as a low-cost networking solution, since the capabilities of the parallel hardware are somewhat limited. However, it gives much better results than SLIP and leaves the serial port free.

REQUIREMENTS

You will need at least kickstart and workbench V2.04 (37.175) to use PLIP. Also some SANA2 compliant networking protocol (like Envoy, AS225R2 or AmiTCP) will come in handy :-).

INSTALLATION

Just copy plip.device to devs:networks. See the documentation of your networking package for further installation steps. If you are going to use both Envoy and AS225 over PLIP at the same time, be sure to first start Envoy, then AS225. If you've got problems with multiple protocol stacks you might try making the packet and host IDs for each protocol unique.

Since PLIP only allows two hosts to be linked together, addressing is limited to 1 Bit. One host uses plip.device, Unit 0, the other one plip.device, Unit 1. The device will not work if both machines use the same unit number.

PLIP looks for an environment variable called ENV:SANA2/PLIP.config. This should contain one line terminated with a newline, which will be parsed by ReadArgs according to the template

TIMEOUT/K/N,PRIORITY=PRI/K/N,MTU/K/N,BPS/K/N,RETRIES/K/N where
TIMEOUT=num: Packet receive timeout, default is 330000. Set to a higher value if you have problems with slow machines.
PRIORITY=num: PLIP task priority, default is 15. Do not change this.
MTU=num: Maximum packet data size, default and maximum is 8192. If you change this, be sure to change it on both machines to the same value!
BPS=num: The nominal bits per second rate returned from a device query. Default is 25000 which is much too low but works with beta Envoy.
RETRIES=num: The maximum number of times, the driver tries to resend a packet on error. Default is 63 which means a total of 64 tries.

An example PLIP.config is included. All recognized parameters will be printed into the startup window of PLIP. If PLIP does not run or shows problems transmitting data first try deleting the PLIP.config file on all connected machines, so PLIP uses the internal default values. If that doesn't help, please contact us (see end of documentation).

CABLE

You will need male (A1000: female) DB25 connectors and some (up to 4 meters) parallel cable. Connect:

        D0-D7/BUSY/POUT   to   D0-D7/BUSY/POUT
        ACK               to   STROBE
        STROBE            to   ACK
        GND               to   GND

You can look up the pin assignment in your Amiga User Manual, appendix A. Please note that this cable differs from ParNet! Double check before using!

There is a potential problem with the RI (ring indicator) line on the serial port. If you have problems running PLIP, first try to remove any device connected to the serial port. If that helps, you might try cutting the RI line in the serial connector.

COPYRIGHT

Under no circumstances may PLIP be used on any machine which is used for the research, development, construction, testing or production of weapons or other military applications. This also includes any machine which is used for training persons for any of the above mentioned purposes.

This is the only restriction, in all other respects you may do with PLIP what you want. Please keep us informed about any enhancements you make.

Use PLIP at your own risk. Please send bug reports to:

        o.wagner@aworld-2.aworld.de

        m.balzer@aworld.aworld.de

Please exactly state the machine configuration which causes PLIP to fail.

HISTORY

V37.11

 - small speedups in transmission handshaking
 - now uses utility library for parsing the buffer
   management taglist

V37.14

 - optimized BPS and MTU
 - cleaned up the code

V38.5

 - fixed CRC check
 - added information window
 - some protocol fixes

V38.7

 - changed hardware type to 13 (official PLIP ID)
 - added configuration mechanism

V38.9

 - some race conditions eliminated
 - packet sequencing corrected
 - added write retry mechanism (configurable)
 - fixed possible AbortIO bug
 - seems to work with Envoy 37.131, at least using
   the default config...

V38.10

 - fixed bug with configuration during startup
 - default MTU reduced to 1024 bytes

V38.11

 - added tracktype support (beta) in order to make
   PLIP work in conjunction with AmiTCP
 - removed autoinit for dos.library

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 21:07:54 GMT, October 23, 2022