Re: [Qemu-devel] problem of SLIRP

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Wed, 2004-09-08 at 22:04, Ye Wen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm wondering why on some machine I can work with SLIRP fine but on others, I
> can
> ping the 10.0.2.2 (router) well but can't access the Internet. Is it because 
> of
> some firewall things?

User mode networking (Slirp) operates at the level of an unpriveleged
socket. That means that it can listen for TCP connections, make TCP
connections, send and receive UDP packets. Basically, you can use the
"port" based protocols.

>From an unpriveleged socket you cannot send raw IP packets. This
includes ICMP messages since ICMP operates at the IP layer, rather than
the ported protocol layer with TCP and UDP.

Ping is an ICMP message. So Slirp fakes a ping by sending a UDP packet
instead. So it is not ping. Your firewall may pass pings but not some
UDP packets. Hence the confusion.

What it comes down to, is don't use ping to test user mode networking,
since it doesn't do what you think. Using a web browser makes a lot more
sense, and is easier to understand the effects. The UDP fakery should
probably be removed since it doesn't really do what anyone thinks, and
therefore just confuses everyone.

Also, for networking problems in general your best bet is to do a
network trace on both the host and the guest, and you can see without
any doubt how the user mode networking scheme is horking up your
packets. I think QEMU is really putting Slirp through its paces, and
Slirp is actually going to be brought up to par in short order...

-- John.