[HECnet] Multinet Tunnel Connections to SG1::

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On Jun 7, 2012, at 1:27 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:

On 2012-06-07 19:18, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:

On Jun 7, 2012, at 9:48 AM, Mark Benson wrote:

...
We established that, yes. That's where my idea of using pcap and
running the interface in promicuous mode came out of.

Why promiscuous?   So long as you can get the DECnet style individual address delivered, and the multicast addresses that DECnet would register, I don't see a need for promiscuous mode.

Right. There is only need for promiscous mode if you sit on an interface with the "wrong" MAC address.

However, if you want to have your DECnet stack portable, you will need to go down that path, as some Unixes don't have a way to change the MAC address of an interface at all.

Also, to comment on your previous post, Paul.
Correct, the API of the current Linux DECnet is not possible to adopt to a new user-level DECnet implementation, as they use explicit system calls, and you can't siphon those off.
Had it all been done through a decnet library, it would have been easier. But the current Linux solution is (I think) similar to the Ultrix one. And it do make sense from a pure interface point of view.

	Johnny

Yes, I believe the socket approach is at least similar to the Ultrix one.

It would be possible to create a more implementation-neutral library style API.   Behind that would be your choice of a thin wrapper around DECnet sockets (for the existing DECnet/Linux) or some suitable inter-process communication to talk to a user-mode DECnet daemon.

Either that, or maybe FUSE could be abused for this?

	paul