Re: n-hurd networking

[Simon Law]

On Wed, Aug 07, 2002 at 01:09:08PM -0700, James Morrison wrote:
> --- Simon Law <sfllaw@uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> >     Wouldn't it be easier to have the Hurd running closest to the
> > hardware, the one on boot, have full control of the network?  Any
> > sub-Hurds could be running on a private internal network, and the
> > primary Hurd could do NAT.
> > 
> >     Of course, this would require something like Netfilter to be
> > ported.  *sigh*
> > 
> > Simon
> 
>  What if the 1st hurd that was booted on a machine crashes?  Should all the
> sub-hurds (or n-hurds, short for neighbourhurd) know they are a sub-hurd so
> they can take over the NAT?  I like the idea of booting two hurds on the same
> machine and each of them having every thing of there own except the cpu(s).

        Theoretically, you could hold an election over the private
internal network, and decide who gets the network device.  Almost all of
this stuff can be done with existing network protocols.

>  My only problem with this so far is that I couldn't talk, over ethernet, from
> one hurd to another hurd on the same machine.

        A thing to work on would be virtual network adapters that don't
physically exist, but merely push data from one sub-Hurd to another.

Simon