[HECnet] Bridge

[Johnny Billquist]

No, I do not use github. I hate git (long story, but that is really a 
side track here).
The tarball contains the sources, so it's free for anyone to inspect, 
play around with, experiment, modify, or use.
The Italian retro-DECnet guys took a copy many moons ago, and did some 
changes to it, which they then used.

The major issues that had me work on the code were that on a recent 
version of Linux, it no longer worked right. And that was because when I 
wrote the bridge, libcap was at version 0.1, and a lot of things I 
needed to do was not possible in libcap itself, such as injecting 
packets on the network, and control of how buffering was done.
So there was conditional code to set things up for Linux, BSD and 
possibly others, using ioctl() as well as write to the underlying file 
descriptor, and doing select() on the file, and just hoping it was 
allowed. All of these things were added in libcap version 1.0, so it 
made sense to remove all my special code, and just use the library 
instead, which means the same code should work on more platforms without 
any hacks. Linux apparently broke their backward compatibility on pcap 
at some point recently, in some undocumented corner that I made use of...

And then people had contributed some cleanup, some more command line 
flags and debug abilities that I never had bothered with (I'm lazy, I 
change the code when needed).

   Johnny

On 2020-02-09 18:22, Rob Jarratt wrote:
> It would be interesting to know more about what bugs and issues you have fixed and what other changes you have included. Is there a list? Do you publish the code on GitHub?
> 
> Regards
> 
> Rob
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE <owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE> On Behalf
>> Of Johnny Billquist
>> Sent: 09 February 2020 12:53
>> To: hecnet <hecnet at Update.UU.SE>
>> Subject: [HECnet] Bridge
>>
>> I just wanted to alert people that I rewrote parts of the bridge code recently.
>>
>> The code was very old, and it started to have problems on some platforms
>> because of the very ancient way it made use of the pcap library. So I finally bit
>> the bullet and rewrote it to make use of the pcap library it is supposed to be
>> used these days. This not only removed some bugs/issues, but it also allowed
>> me to remove some conditional code for different OSes.
>>
>> In addition I also introduced some other changes that others have contributed,
>> making it hopefully a little nicer to use.
>>
>> The bridge tarball can be found on:
>> http://mim.update.uu.se/hecnet
>>
>> or
>>
>> http://psilo.update.uu.se/~bqt/hecnet
>>
>>     Johnny
>>
>> --
>> Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
>>                                     ||  on a psychedelic trip
>> email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
>> pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
> 

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol