Here are a few quick points about DECnet support...
+ o iproute2 is the tool of choice for configuring the DECnet support for
+ Linux. For many features, it is the only tool which can be used to
+ configure them.
+
o No name resolution is available as yet, all addresses must be
entered numerically.
- o The neighbour cache may well list every entry as having the address
- 0.170. This is due to a problem that I need to sort out kernel side.
- It is harmless (but don't try and use neigh add yet) just look in
- /proc/net/decnet_neigh to see the real addresses for now.
+ o Remember to set the hardware address of the interface using:
+
+ ip link set ethX address xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
+ (where xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx is the MAC address for your DECnet node
+ address)
- o The rtnetlink support in the kernel is rather exprimental, expect a
- few odd things to happen for the next few DECnet kernel releases.
+ if your Ethernet card won't listen to more than one unicast
+ mac address at once. If the Linux DECnet stack doesn't talk to
+ any other DECnet nodes, then check this with tcpdump and if its
+ a problem, change the mac address (but do this _before_ starting
+ any other network protocol on the interface)
o Whilst you can use ip addr add to add more than one DECnet address to an
interface, don't expect addresses which are not the same as the
- kernels node address to work properly. i.e. You will break the DECnet
- protocol if you do add anything other than the automatically generated
- interface addresses to ethernet cards. This option is there for future
- link layer support, where the device will have to be configed for
- DECnet explicitly.
-
- o The DECnet support is currently self contained. You do not need the
- libdnet library to use it. In fact until I've sent the dnet_pton and
- dnet_ntop functions to Patrick to add, you can't use libdnet.
-
- o If you are not using the very latest 2.3.xx series kernels, don't
- try and list DECnet routes if you've got IPv6 compiled into the
- kernel. It will oops.
-
- o My main reason for writing the DECnet support for iproute2 was to
- check out the DECnet routing code, so the route get and
- route show cache commands are likely to be the most debugged out of
- all of them.
-
- o If you find bugs in the DECnet support, please send them to me in the
- first instance, and then I'll send Alexey a patch to fix it. IPv4/6
- bugs should be sent to Alexey as before.
-
-Steve Whitehouse <SteveW@ACM.org>
+ kernels node address to work properly with 2.4 kernels. This should
+ be fine with 2.6 kernels as the routing code has been extensively
+ modified and improved.
+
+ o The DECnet support is currently self contained. It does not depend on
+ the libdnet library.
+
+Steve Whitehouse <steve@chygwyn.com>
git://git.onelab.eu / iproute2.git / blobdiff