Date   : Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:27:34 +0100
From   : philb@... (Phil Blundell)
Subject: Econet <> Ethernet

On Tue, 2009-07-28 at 22:16 +0100, Michael Firth wrote:
> Is it possible to route RFC2003 through typical DSL firewall / routers?
> 
> I thought they were limited to forwarding TCP or UDP ports, RFC2003 seems
> to be a seperate IP protocol from TCP and UDP (4 vs 6 and 17)

Ah, hm, good question.  I'm not sure, I guess some experimentation would
be needed.  If necessary you could do a similar thing over UDP of
course.

> > Heh, right.  Something like *SERVERS is probably the easiest way of
> > exercising broadcasts.
> >
> Presumably *STATIONS does something similar? (though I guess though
> you typically get more responses, the broadcast initial message is 
> presumably
> very similar)

Actually no, *STATIONS operates in a completely different way and
doesn't use broadcasts at all.  It just attempts a machine peek
operation against every possible station number (254...1) on the
specified network, and reports those that respond.

> Out of interest, how far away do you think the Econet<>Ethernet device is
> from being something that other people can buy / use?

That's an interesting question.  I guess the software is at least 6 or 8
weeks away from being usable "out of the box" by general users.  For
people who are willing and able to compile their own firmware images
it's probably close to being usable now, and I do have one or two boards
that I could send to interested individuals.

p.