Greetings network geeks, I am about to implement Ethernet/802.3 over Cisco HDLC. My plan is to enhance hdlc_cisco.c to provide a new ethernet-like device, "cbeX" (cisco-bridged ethernet), corresponding to the existing "hdlcX" device that encapsulates the ethernet frames. The "cbeX" device will suddenly appear when "sethdlc hdlcX cisco ..." is run, and disappear when "hdlcX" is taken out of Cisco mode. Using a separate device for the bridged frames provides a way to get ethernet-like behavior without obscuring the Cisco nature of "hdlcX". For example, a tcpdump of "hdlcX" would still show SLARP keepalive frames and other ciscoey stuff. I had also considered simply making "hdlcX" look like an ethernet device, and "preserving" the SLARP packets for tcpdump by prepending a phony ethernet header. I abandoned that design because I could not find an appropriate ethertype to mark such packets. (It has other drawbacks too, but at least it would be simple.) Comments, suggestions, and warnings are welcome. -- Dan Eble <dane@aiinet.com> _____ . Software Engineer | _ |/| Applied Innovation Inc. | |_| | | http://www.aiinet.com/ |__/|_|_| - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
