> Hmmm, ppp is actually useful for getting the OS onto laptops with no
>CD - or it was in the pre-pcmcia days :-)  I guess its probably safe
>to leave out these days.

I was recently experimenting with putting NetBSD onto a laptop.  It
couldn't read the CD that I had (a CD-R media); I don't know if it was
that it just didn't like the media, or if it was a drive problem.  (The
drive had worked shortly before, but shortly after it failed.  I vaguely
recall that it had had a history of not liking CD-R type stuff, though.)

``No problem'', thought I, ``I'll just boot from floppy and PPP over a
null modem...''

That was when I discovered that we don't have pppd in the install floppy,
which makes it kind of useless, IMHO.  Or can PPP be used without running
the daemon?

I eventually ended up using tip to login on my regular computer, and then
got a SLIP connection (thankfully that was still included, though it
seemed to have the brain-damaged ~200-byte MTU's that caused me such
problems when I hooked up my old Amiga...but that's another tale).

Since I never have set up NFS before, I wasn't able to figoure that out
for the install, and instead ftp'ed the files over the null-modem.


In sum: I don't see how PPP is useful without pppd; without PPP, SLIP is
nice to have, and ftp is a simple fall-back if you have the disk-space for
it.  If PPP is to be worth the bytes it carries along, shouldn't pppd also
be included?


  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  --rkr@rkr.kcnet.com