[HECnet] Multinet Tunnel Connections to SG1::

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2012-06-06 23:40, Mark Benson wrote:

On 6 Jun 2012, at 22:37,<Paul_Koning at Dell.com>   wrote:


On Jun 6, 2012, at 5:34 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:

On 2012-06-06 22:40, Rob Jarratt wrote:
...
It would be a fun exercise to turn the bridge into an actual DECnet router.
One day, when I have a lot of time I might even think about trying that.

Feel free. The specifications are out there, so it's definitely not an impossible task. But I guess it will take some work. It would be very nice if the bridge did turn into a WAN router...

	Johnny

DECnet Phase IV is pretty straightforward.   The specs are all out there.   And much of it is implemented in Linux, so you can find C sources ready to go...   Even if sample code only does L1 routing, you're nearly there because area routing is essentially the same thing done a second time on a second set of tables.

There may be mileage in building dedicated DECnet bridges/routers using RaspberryPi boards in a suitable case running a very cut-down Linux with an advanced version of the bridge? I am no programming wizard but I am good at compiling and testing stuff.

Hmm. Sure. But if you go the Linux routing route, then you instead get into the problem that it don't have a point-to-point connection to another Linux box on the Internet...

Would it require 2 Ethernet interfaces to work or would (like the bridge) just one work okay?

It would (today) require two ethernet interfaces, in which it routes between. However, talking about connections across the world, you are not even sitting on any shared ethernet networks, so it will not give you what you need for HECnet until you add some point-to-point connection, using IP (and whatever) to some other destination.
Maybe something already exists to accomplish this. Not sure if the GRE implementation in Linux can be used to solve it...

	Johnny