Re: Need help with netbase

[kunihiro@zebra.org]

>was inetd. tcp_wrappers compiled almost, but that's it. Neither route,
>ifconfig nor other things did even compile, because they rely heavily on
>linux kernel heeaders.

Many people pointed out we should use inetutils on Hurd.  Yes that's
right.  But inetutils don't have ifconfig/route/netstat.  So I want to
comment about the different aspect of the network utilities problems
on the Hurd.

To implement route/ifconfig/netstat commands or routing daemons we
have to communicate with kernel's internal data structure such as
specified interface is up or down?, how many packets does this
interface recieve?, how many routing entry exists in the kernel?.

In traditional UNIX kernel, we use very ugly ioctl or sysctl method to
fetch or set configuration to the interface.  *BSD implement kernel
routing socket which can send/recieve interface and routing related
information between the kernel.  And Linux now has netlink interface
which has much more functionality compared with *BSD's routing socket.
It's very confusing and there is no standard way.

In the Hurd world, things are completely different. Those commands
have to communicate with only pfinet process.  I think it's good idea
that write ifconfig/route/netstat from scratch.

I've tried to write route command for the Hurd.  I've posted detailed
information to bug-hurd@gnu.org.  Below is patch to glibc and hurd.
Now I'm implementing ifconfig for the Hurd.

ftp://ftp.zebra.org/pub/hurd/hurd-pfinet-patch-0.1.tar.gz

If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know.
--
Kunihiro Ishiguro