[rescue] routing between FDDI and enet

[Joshua Snyder]

On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, Mark Price wrote:

> I chimed in earlier about building a linux bridge to do fast ethernet and
> fddi.  I have since found out that linux' bridging is strictly limited to
> ethernet, and I don't think anyone is working on expanding it.  I have
> since finished my 4-port ethernet linux bridge this evening.
>
> If someone can confirm one of the BSD's will do FDDI <-> ethernet bridging
> I'd love the details.  I found a post on here over a year ago of someone
> saying they were working on it w/ NetBSD
>
>
>  Mark
>

Ok a little background, I work for ImageStream Internet Solutions we make
linux based routers.  A long time ago we ran into this same problem with
bridging under linux.  It's not too hard to get linux bridging to work
with stuff other than Ethernet.  In fact we can currently bridge
Ethernet, Atm and Frame Relay.  It wouldn't be hard for me to get it
working and send a Kernel patch to you guys.  We might have an issue with
changing the Fddi frame format, but it shouldn't be too hard as we already
have to do stuff with Snap headers when bridging Atm.  My only big problem
would be a total lack of any Fddi hardware to test with.

Some of you might be wondering why this code isn't part of the standard
kernel two reasons, the code is still a work in progress and needs to be
cleaned up also most of the kernel patches that we have submitted have been
dismissed because we don't have fully open source drivers for our wan
cards.  Politics!  We would love to give the community fully open source
drivers for the wan cards but can't release the firmware(because we didn't
write it) for the cards.   Because of this most of the kernel developers
ignore any patches that we send.

			josh