[HECnet] Next retro comms project?

[Sampsa Laine]

On 21 Oct 2009, at 14:55, Bob Armstrong wrote:

Well, if we're going to go off into Wishful Thinking Land here :-)

* DECnet for BSD, especially 2.11 PDP-11 bsd.   Yes, a 16 bit version is
significantly harder than a 32 bit version, I know, but there are several
real PDP11s out there running BSD that could be on HECnet.   I know - I've
got one!   We could use the Linux DECnet as a starting point - the dn
userspace utility programs might not even be that hard to port - but we'd
need a kernel wizard to do the tricky bits :-)


Just an idea, and I'm not a network programming guru at all, but do we really need to have stuff in the kernel? Could we not just have a userland process that writes frames to the network interface* and then apps talk to the server process? I imagine this is easier to both write and debug...

Sampsa

* assuming we are able to write raw frames to the net interface of course...