Portable Ethernet Access Library

[Alex Dupuy]

I have written a portable ethernet access library that is rather simpler
to use than raw DLI or NIT, and is portable to Suns and machines running
Ultrix.  I have submitted it to comp.sources.unix, but since it will be a
while before it appears there, I thought I'd describe it here, so that
people with FTP access don't have to wait to get it.

These functions provide access to the raw ethernet for user-level
programs.  On Suns, they are implemented using NIT(4p) (network interface
tap).  While they do not provide the full functionality of NIT, these
functions do run on both the socket- and streams-based NIT
implementations.  On Ultrix systems, they are implemented using DLI (data
link interface).  These functions are not designed to be used for ethernet
monitoring, but rather for programs implementing ethernet protocols such
as RARP, or the Ethernet configuration test protocol.

Context diffs to the ethernet tools package recently posted to
comp.sources.sun that change it to use this ethernet access library are
included.  I am indebted to Phil Budne for having provided such a useful
test suite for this library.

If you do build ethertools on Ultrix machines, note that only ctp and ctpd
will run, and that only ctp will do anything useful, due to limitations of
the DLI interface.  Also note that rlog doesn't work on SPARC machines,
due to different internal structure alignment.

This library can be obtained via anonymous FTP from columbia.edu or
cs.columbia.edu, in the file pub/etherlib.tar.Z.

The original ethertools distribution is in pub/ethertools.tar.Z.

@alex
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