Networking Utilities, Libraries, etc.#

New Utilities#

The Networking project includes the following new or updated utilities and services:

Libraries#

Protocols#

Transparent Distributed Processing (aka QNET)#

Please see the QNET wiki page

Auto IP (or IPv4 Link Local Address as in RFC)#

"AutoIP" is an implementation of RFC 3927, "Dynamic Configuration of IPv4 Link-Local Addresses". The source lives in sys/lsm/autoip and is implemented as a shared object so it can be loaded into the stack dynamically.

The code is pretty straight forward. A filter function is hooked in which examines the in/out ARP packets. For incoming ARP packets, it checks to see if it is in conflict with the Link Local Address which we've selected, and it then defends or re-selects the address accordingly. For outgoing packets, an ARP REPLY packet broadcast is sent onto the network (instead of uni-cast).

"AutoIP" can be started same as other lsm modules:

* ~io-pkt -d <driver> -p autoip

The only thing to watch out for, is if you use autoip in a multi-interface environment (say you have 2 network card). Try to use the "if=" option to target the protocol to a specific interface. If you really want both of your interfaces to run in "autoip" mode, make sure you understand exactly what could happen. The RFC has a whole chapter of "Considerations for Multiple Interfaces" that discusses this (see section 3 of rfc3927).