Date   : Mon, 18 Sep 2006 23:27:09 +0100
From   : Richard Gellman <splodge@...>
Subject: Re: [almost OT] Econet/NetFS server for Linux - Interest?

Rob wrote:
> At 22:32 18/09/2006, Richard Gellman wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> As a personal challenge, and due to an astonishing lack of Google 
>> results on the subject, I've started writing an Econet/NetFS server 
>> for Linux, using the AUN (Econet-over-UDP) protocol. This means its 
>> somewhat limited to 32-bit machines with an ethernet card at present, 
>> but it could be adapted to operate with native Econet cards. So far 
>> its working well with the stock NetFS (no !OmniClient here), 
>> including Logon, Directory Browse (with LIB support), object info 
>> (*INFO), limited file reading (e.g. *TYPE, reading files into !Edit 
>> seems to work well), filetyping, and Logoff.
>>
>> Should the project ever reach completion (its a spare time thing, you 
>> know what happens...) would there be any interest afield in the 
>> program? Or am I completely re-inventing the wheel here, and I just 
>> didn't Google hard enough?
>
> Sounds good to me!
>
> And it would finally be something I'd be able to test the econet 
> implementation in BeebEm against! (It's supposed to be talking AUN, 
> but I've never had anything acorn with ethernet in it to test it with!)
>
> Oh, and I run FreeBSD rather than Linux on the servers here, so as 
> long as it compiles on that I'll be happy :-)
>
> Rob.
Hi Rob,

It *should* work with such emulation... certainly the specification I'm 
following is BBC Micro-level according the MDFS manual (documentation is 
disturbingly scarce...), so hardware aside it should work fine.

As for a FreeBSD compile.... I don't think I've used any linux specific 
functions, so it should be BSD-happy. I would note though that it will 
die (read: send bogus info to clients) on big-endian machines; if your 
box is x86 then this won't be a problem :)

-- Richard