n-hurd networking

[Hisham Kotry]

Hird, 

I'm having some partial troubles here...

What's are the options of providing a n-hurd with
networking support?

The only possible scenario I can see is to get all
n-hurds to use the same network stack. Otherwise, some
un-expected actions will happen that could break
connectivity for other n-hurds, for exmaple, if every
n-hurd starts its own hurd-net translator and reads
all traffic entering a specific NIC, some stuff could
happen, like:

1)two sockets on seperate n-hurds could bind() to the
same port due to the lack of pre-shared socket state
(we could implement a ports server that would be
shared between n-hurds, inspired by the Alpine ULN
wich had to handle this same problem because of
in-kernel sockets, that tracks some Layer3 specific
info).

2)how would we diffrentiate/classify some generic
protocols? for exmaple, (we have a process per
protocol here) if two icmp (it's a layered apparaoch,
so saying icmp here is more prescise than saying IP)
stacks recive the same ECHO_REQ (icmp ping) packet,
whom should reply? I'm not sure of the other hosts
behaviour to an ICMP_ECHO_REPLY that was sent without
a prior ECHO_REQ (note that the host sent one ping,
one stack replies and the other's reply gets lost in
space).

Other problems will appear by time, and the reason for
this post isn't a "what troubles there are", instead I
was seaking a solution to this current issue.

I think the only sane solution is to either have all
n-hurds use the same hurd-net translator, assign each
n-hurd their own IP (but this isn't a solution either
for those who want to setup servers on their
n-hurds)or simply rely on having having a nic-to-hurd
mapping so that two n-hurds wont use the same NIC at
the same time.

Any ideas anyone?
kotry

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