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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Topic started by: amigakit on September 02, 2013, 10:32:38 AM

Title: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: amigakit on September 02, 2013, 10:32:38 AM
AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement

September 2nd 2013

AmigaKit (http://www.amigakit.com), long-standing Amiga computer retailer and developer of the EasyNet (http://www.amigakit.com/easynet) software has secured a distribution agreement for AMITCP 4 with the developers, NSDi.

The deal will result in AMITCP 4 being available once again for commercial sale integrated into the forthcoming EasyNet Professional Edition package.

 EasyNet (http://www.amigakit.com/easynet) is a modern Internet networking package for Classic Amiga computers, which also provides a feature-rich front end for AMITCP.

Existing users of the standard EasyNet will be eligible for a future upgrade package to the Professional Edition.

Managing Director of AmigaKit, Matthew Leaman, commented: “We are pleased to once again support the Amiga and bring new software developments to market.  EasyNet will continue to be upgraded over the next few months and beyond, re-affirming our commitment to our customers and product.  The inclusion of AMITCP 4 into this package will strengthen the application and give users more functionality.”

Tomi Ollila of NSDi commented: “We, the creators of AmiTCP/IP are pleased to see there is nice market for the Amiga machine and operating system that has taught us so much during it's existence and we hope this agreement with AmigaKit makes it even better.”
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: rockape on September 02, 2013, 01:16:33 PM
Hi Matthew,

Well done you and "The Team" for helping us to keep our most favourite computer alive.

Kind Regards, Michael

aka rockape


Founder member of LAG

aka LINCS AMIGA GROUP

See http://lincsamiga.org.uk/
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: mfilos on September 02, 2013, 01:56:35 PM
Outstanding news! Congratz once more Matthew!

Despite being settled for years with MiamiDX and recently with Neil's WPA2 prism2 driver for my A600, I just grabbed an EasyNet CD just for the support.
Thanks for helping us keep the Amiga alive :)
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: NovaCoder on September 02, 2013, 02:18:44 PM
Yep good news, I think I'll have to upgrade my EasyNet install soon :)
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: Matt_H on September 02, 2013, 02:57:28 PM
Wow, nice work!
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: takemehomegrandma on September 02, 2013, 03:28:20 PM
How does AmiTCP 4 compare to the latest Roadshow, in features and performance?
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: nicholas on September 02, 2013, 04:53:18 PM
I thought it was GPL+BSD code?
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: LoadWB on September 02, 2013, 05:42:52 PM
Quote from: takemehomegrandma;746840
How does AmiTCP 4 compare to the latest Roadshow, in features and performance?


This.  I've purchased Roadshow and it performs VERY well.
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: nicholas on September 02, 2013, 05:51:29 PM
Quote from: LoadWB;746843
This.  I've purchased Roadshow and it performs VERY well.


It's the best stack out there IMO. That includes all other 68k stacks, AROS and MorphOS.
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: yssing on September 02, 2013, 06:14:44 PM
great news :)
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: Matt_H on September 02, 2013, 07:03:26 PM
Quote from: nicholas;746842
I thought it was GPL+BSD code?


That's v3. v4 is commercial.
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: nicholas on September 02, 2013, 07:29:46 PM
Quote from: Matt_H;746851
That's v3. v4 is commercial.


What does it offer over any of the stacks derived from v3 or over Roadshow?
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: Jeff on September 03, 2013, 02:44:10 AM
I'm in. I spent quite some effort trying to buy a copy of AmiTCP 4.x back in the day. You'll have my support for sure. I also purchased the Roadshow download!
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: Matt_H on September 03, 2013, 03:52:35 AM
Quote from: nicholas;746853
What does it offer over any of the stacks derived from v3 or over Roadshow?


Choice? I really don't know enough of the technical workings to be able to tell you. If Genesis or another GUI is part of the deal, that would be a big advantage.
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: mfilos on September 03, 2013, 07:53:08 AM
Quote from: takemehomegrandma;746840
How does AmiTCP 4 compare to the latest Roadshow, in features and performance?


I also don't know as I haven't tried Roadshow yet, but in a thread over EAB Jens replied the following:

Quote

I also thought that Roadshow is faster, but AmiTCP kicks Roadshow's ass if you tweak cache sizes the same way.

Jens
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: nicholas on September 03, 2013, 10:45:36 AM
Quote from: mfilos;746882
I also don't know as I haven't tried Roadshow yet, but in a thread over EAB Jens replied the following:


Interesting!
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: amigakit on September 03, 2013, 11:03:30 AM
@Matt_H

Quote
If Genesis or another GUI is part of the deal, that would be a big advantage.

Thats the point: EasyNet (http://www.amigakit.com/easynet) replaces Genesis completely with new modern features such as Wireless Network Scanning, SMB connections, VNC etc

@MFilos @rockape

Many thanks!
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: TCMSLP on September 03, 2013, 01:45:44 PM
Any suggestions of price?   Will NSDI continue to support it?   I'm guessing further development is out of the question.  So, Roadshow will continue to be the only actively developed stack?

I'm asking as I intend to purchase one or the other, just weighing up the advantages/disadvantages.

Great news though :)
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: LoadWB on September 03, 2013, 01:59:02 PM
At the very least this is an opportunity for some who have a copy of AmiTCP 4 to go legit.  I am intrigued by Jen's comment on performance, and considering that AmiTCP seems to be rather mature I don't see its development status as an issue.  EasyNet's wireless capabilities have piqued my curiosity, as well, as I have a 1200 which could be more easily portable with wireless scanning and configuration.
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: Duce on September 03, 2013, 02:05:13 PM
Just curious what wireless security protocols/standards AmiTCP 4.0 supports?  Considering picking up another legacy, big box Amiga but I absolutely need WEP/WEP2 support out of a TCP stack.

Cheers in advance,
Duce
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: amigakit on September 03, 2013, 02:20:53 PM
@TCMSLP

We will be providing support and we will be further developing components.
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: mfilos on September 03, 2013, 02:44:21 PM
It's not a matter of AmiTCP but of the WiFi Ethernet driver.
For example Neil's prism2 driver supports WEP/WPA2 just fine. Most of us use it already with MiamiDx, AmiTCP, Genesis etc.
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: amigakit on September 03, 2013, 03:01:20 PM
@MFilos

Every EasyNet wireless package we sell, a percentage in revenue goes back to Neil to pay him for his work and to encourage further development of the driver: you may have noticed the new v2.5 revision out last week from him.

New wireless features in EasyNet which are not available through the Aminet packages.
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: takemehomegrandma on September 03, 2013, 04:44:30 PM
Quote from: mfilos;746882
I also don't know as I haven't tried Roadshow yet, but in a thread over EAB Jens replied the following:

Quote:
Quote
I also thought that Roadshow is faster, but AmiTCP kicks Roadshow's ass if you tweak cache sizes the same way.

Jens



I'm a little curious about that, since the old version of MorphOS's native Netstack that was based on AmiTCP 4 (before MorphOS 3.2 was released, that introduced an updated Netstack built on a newer FreeBSD code base), was noticeably outperformed by Roadshow 68k.

I think it would be interesting to see some real, measured and verified benchmarks between AmiTCP 4 and Roadshow. Is there any?

:)
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: mfilos on September 03, 2013, 05:35:04 PM
Well done Matthew I didn't know about that detail! Kudos!
In fact I was curious how you managed to make some things that can't be done on the free packages like Wireless network scanning.

I can't wait testing your product.

@takemehomegrandma
Indeed that would be nice. Jens was gathering info from users of Roadshow, AmiTCP, Miami, Genesis etc in this EAB thread:
http://eab.abime.net/request-other/69767-network-performance-tests.html

Never tried the tweaks like: TCP_SendSpace=16384 and TCP_RecvSpace=16384 but will surely gief it a try once EasyNet arrives :)
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: pVC on September 03, 2013, 06:15:53 PM
Quote from: takemehomegrandma;746913
I'm a little curious about that, since the old version of MorphOS's native Netstack that was based on AmiTCP 4 (before MorphOS 3.2 was released, that introduced an updated Netstack built on a newer FreeBSD code base), was noticeably outperformed by Roadshow 68k.


Although that wasn't the case with all setups...

Quote

I think it would be interesting to see some real, measured and verified benchmarks between AmiTCP 4 and Roadshow. Is there any?


That's quite difficult to make. Firstly would you like LAN speeds or internet. In LAN you might get somehow comparable results, but there might not be much differences finally. And internet is quite versatile nowadays.. it's hard to make any real world tests. You never know what kind of routes data comes and is for example window scaling or other new feature needed for the best speed etc...
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: LoadWB on September 03, 2013, 07:27:12 PM
Quote from: pVC;746926
And internet is quite versatile nowadays.. it's hard to make any real world tests. You never know what kind of routes data comes and is for example window scaling or other new feature needed for the best speed etc...


I think you meant "volatile," but I get your meaning nonetheless.  Yes, this is what I try to explain to people when they run Internet speed tests.  These tests are not always reliable, though reliable enough in many circumstances.  For instance, ComCast houses a number of speedtest.net servers, which will produce much better results than servers outside of the ComCast network.  Especially with the peering point issues which exist with AS45-whatever and Qwest.
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: Metalguy66 on September 04, 2013, 06:00:06 PM
Yep, it would definitely be kewl if someone took the initiative and coded some type of netspeed benchmark app for the 68k amiga, and then a corresponding "speedtest server app" that could be run on the "other end" whether that be windows, linux, amiga, etc..

This would allow you to set up controlled tests which could produce very relevant speed comparissons given the known nature of the LAN/WAN you were testing over..
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: spirantho on September 04, 2013, 07:14:23 PM
@MetalGuy66

When I want to benchmark something I just download a large file with a good FTP program, sometimes off the internet or maybe off another machine on the network if the connection is fast enough that the internet may be a bottleneck. That's as good a benchmark as needed, really.
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: nicholas on September 04, 2013, 11:38:31 PM
Quote from: spirantho;747036
@MetalGuy66

When I want to benchmark something I just download a large file with a good FTP program, sometimes off the internet or maybe off another machine on the network if the connection is fast enough that the internet may be a bottleneck. That's as good a benchmark as needed, really.


+1

I always use FTP across my LAN in both directions to test the speed of a particular piece of hardware or IP stack.

So far Roadshow is the fastest of all the various 68k and PPC stacks I've used but I am yet to try Jens' suggested tweaks to AmiTCP.
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: Gulliver on September 05, 2013, 12:23:00 AM
@amigakit

When are you going to update you current EasyNet with AmiTCP4?
Will it get the packet fix patch included? http://aminet.net/comm/tcp/AmiTCP_PacketFix.lha
Is the Xsurf-100 ethernet package going to be updated accordingly?
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: magnetic on September 05, 2013, 01:54:57 AM
Quote from: amigakit;746909
@MFilos

Every EasyNet wireless package we sell, a percentage in revenue goes back to Neil to pay him for his work and to encourage further development of the driver: you may have noticed the new v2.5 revision out last week from him.

New wireless features in EasyNet which are not available through the Aminet packages.



Will the new version of "Easynet" support wireless WPA/WPA2 encryption?
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: kolla on September 05, 2013, 02:05:22 AM
WPA normally means "WPA2 Enterprise" these days, but I'm guessing you all mean WPA-PSK. Right?
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: LoadWB on September 05, 2013, 05:31:22 AM
Quote from: kolla;747080
WPA normally means "WPA2 Enterprise" these days, but I'm guessing you all mean WPA-PSK. Right?

In the absences of PSK being specifically mentioned, I would say "yes."  I seriously doubt a home environment, and thus our hobby Amigas, would have the functionality let alone the need for 802.1x or RADIUS-based authentication.  Enterprise would require some SSL libraries, as well.

(I know from using the driver that WPA/WPA2 worked via a pre-shared key, so I automatically exclude "enterprise" as an option.)

If otherwise, I would be happily surprised.  I run 802.1x in my home environment because I have a home office and I keep my work systems connected via a VLAN.  I just wish I could get a RADIUS server working properly on my Solaris system.
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: catohagen on September 05, 2013, 01:40:38 PM
Regarding performance comparisons between differenct tcp stacks, setting proper tcp values for buffers and cache would increase throughput on any 90's stack, as back then we had dialup internet and weaker hardware. If I remember correctly, Roadshow had very low tcp.send/recv values as default(512byte?),  and if you check config files for modern linux stacks, tcp.send/recv are 256k or more.

As for my personal experience with Roadshow(on morphos), fastest transferrate was 35MB/s with 68K samba 2.2.5 (and we all know smb is slow)

tcp.send/recv for Roadshow was then calculated with my arexx installer script, based on netstack math found in linux forums.
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: amigakit on September 08, 2013, 04:43:00 PM
EasyNet (http://www.amigakit.com/easynet) is bundled with all our X-Surf 100 (http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=1156) network cards so you can get started straight away.  We will have a new update to EasyNet this week which adds configuration options for the X-Surf 100

(http://www.amigakit.com/images/EasyNet_X-Surf-100.jpg)
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: lost_loven on September 08, 2013, 07:14:12 PM
@amigakit - YOU GUYS ROCK! I can't wait to get mine.. I hope with in the next week or so!

lost
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: LoadWB on September 08, 2013, 07:18:20 PM
Quote from: amigakit;747277
EasyNet (http://www.amigakit.com/easynet) is bundled with all our X-Surf 100 (http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=1156) network cards so you can get started straight away.  We will have a new update to EasyNet this week which adds configuration options for the X-Surf 100


So, to make sure I fully understand, you are saying the X-Surf 100, the badest-ass native Amiga Zorro network card to ever exist*, comes with a full TCP/IP stack and graphical configuration interface?

* Debate is beyond the scope of this post and left as an exercise for the reader, but most assuredly merits further fully-funded government research.
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: amigakit on September 08, 2013, 07:55:26 PM
@loadwb

Yes that's correct when it is bought from us.  

@lost_loven

Thanks.
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: giZmo350 on September 08, 2013, 09:41:32 PM
AmigaKit is Da Bomb! I will be ordering the PCMCIA ethernet network card for my A1200 wedge just as soon as the new updated easy net software is shipped with the product (or will it not matter to wait for this weeks updated software if I am ordering the PCMCIA ethernet card?)! Been wanting one for a long time as, even though USB ethernet works, it is sloooooow!

@AmigaKit
When might the EasyNet Pro version be available, perhaps? Will the PCMCIA ethernet card take advantage of the new PRO version of EasyNet (I assume with the V4 of AmiTCP)? Also, when I order the PCMCIA ethernet card do I need to specify in the order that I want the EasyNet driver disk and the EasyNet software or will it just come with the order?

Thanks AmigaKit! You ROCK!
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: amigakit on September 08, 2013, 10:34:08 PM
@gizmo350

Thanks :)

The new EasyNet update will be out this week.

All existing users will be able to upgrade to EasyNet Pro in October - we hope to get it ready in time for Amiwest.  it will work with cards supported at the moment by the standard version.

The driver disk always comes with the respective PCMCIA card as well as the EasyNet software
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: amigakit on September 09, 2013, 12:33:23 AM
@magnetic

Quote
Will the new version of "Easynet" support wireless WPA/WPA2 encryption?

Yes it does, plus wireless network scanning - a first for Classic Amigas!

(http://www.amigakit.com/images/easynet_wireless_scan.jpg)
Title: Re: AmigaKit Secures AMITCP 4 Distribution Agreement
Post by: NovaCoder on September 09, 2013, 12:41:12 AM
Quote from: amigakit;747315
@magnetic

Yes it does, plus wireless network scanning - a first for Classic Amigas!



Very nice :)