AOL uses a proprietary protocol to provide clients with access to the Internet. It's pretty slick, but unfortunately it doesn't do much for folk who aren't running Windows or MacOS (or any other platforms they might support).

This software is a reverse-engineered implementation of AOL's service protocols. Included is a client that connects to AOL via either a socket or serial line, and sets up the AOL IP tunnel. It currently only runs on Linux, although adding support to [Free|Net|Open]BSD should be pretty trivial.

This software is quite rough around the edges :-) Don't expect to be able to just build it and wham! everything works! Use at your own risk.

Building and running it should be pretty straightforward. To connect via the serial line, you need to use cu or kermit to connect to the AOL host and then run the client.

The client should sign on, do some stuff, and then print out some information for you: Your IP address and a nameserver. Take a look at the script aolinit.sh for an idea of how to set things up.

Give it a whirl, if you have any suggestions drop me a line. This is very much beta software and under development.

aol-0.5.tar.gz

1998 James Croall,
james@foo.org