Date   : Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:02:25 +0100
From   : robert@... (Rob)
Subject: Econet <> Ethernet

On 28/07/2009, Phil Blundell <philb@...> wrote:
>
> Yeah, that works well enough within a site where you can use
> private-network addressing.  But for WAN routing across the Internet it
> isn't quite sufficient because it would still require you to assign a
> globally-routable IP to each station and that isn't likely to be
> feasible for a lot of people.  (I'm not quite sure how RIPE would react
> if you approached them requesting to be allocated a /24 network to use
> with AUN, but I think the chances of success would be slim.)

As an after-effect of the old Econet.cfg file, it's possible to
specify *any* ip/port to a given station, thus if I set up a copy of
BeebEm running a fileserver on an externally visible port, anybody
should be able to add that to econet.cfg and *I AM me !  (I may try
doing just that, actually, if I can find a way of getting a windows
machine that close to the outside world)   However, although all such
machine would be able to see the fileserver, they'd not be able to see
each other, as none would know the IP addresses of any of the others
[1]


>
> In order to make it workable for routing between different sites, which
> might only have a single globally-routable IP address each, you'd need
> to add some kind of encapsulation or tunnelling layer on top of the AUN
> protocol.  The easiest way to do that would be RFC2003 IP-in-IP.

Several years ago, I used to run a PPTP server that allowed me to set
up a connection home from any random windows machine that I came
across, (as PPTP is buit in) and gave me a local IP address.   I was
considering doing this again, maybe on a seperate IP range, to allow
disperate BeebEms (or whatever!) access.

I've had a quck look at RFC2003, and it looks like it's pretty easy as
you say..  would just need to work out how to implement it!



>
> Heh, right.  Something like *SERVERS is probably the easiest way of
> exercising broadcasts.

ah yes, need to get notmon running on the econet and watch it a bit ...

>
> Very good.  I'm somewhat ashamed to report that I haven't actually tried
> out the BeebEm AUN bits yet, though I know Mark has had a go with them.
> I guess we should try to find out why it doesn't seem to want to talk to
> our bri^H^H^Hgateway at the moment.

lol. I'll try and pack up the current version & email a copy later.

Rob

[1]It occured to me last night that I could add some sort of
data-exchange between machines to swap "I know about these other
machines" data, but not thought much more about that and it's
implications yet.