And under Windoze 95, and, especially, on the RMNC, which is a
cheap dedicated hardware.
If you have just one link to a FlexNet node, there is no need
(and no benefit) from using the FlexNet routing protocol, you
have only one choice anyway :-)
If you've more than one link, it's probably better to let an
RMNC handle the radio links and connect the linux box to the
RMNC. That's the way it's done on most linux servers here.
We've been thinking of porting FlexNet stuff to Linux, but the current
structure of ax25 in the linux kernel gives us some headaches.
ax25 network interfaces are currently just common IP network
interfaces.
In FlexNet, there's only one interface between the IP layer and
the AX.25 layer, regardless of how many ax25 radio ports you have.
Then the AX.25 layer maintains a table associating IP addresses
to callsigns and (partial) AX.25 routes.
Another issue is the channel access protocol. In the current Linux
implementation, every ax25 interface driver handles channel access
on its own. In FlexNet, channel access is done by the ax25 protocol
stack. This has many advantages, for example more accurate
channel timing, better channel access algorithm, possibility to
handle multirate channels, etc. But unfortunately you will loose
the support for KISS _TNC_'s, just like FlexNet does not support
KISS TNC's (however KISS can be used to interconnect computers over
a wire).
It would probably be possible to implement the routing protocol
half heartedly, but I think this won't be very satisfying. And
I'm not so sure that the current routing table implementation
would perform well enough if there are 500 or so routes...
73s
Tom