README.decnet

Here are a few quick points about DECnet support...

 o No name resolution is available as yet, all addresses must be
   entered numerically.

 o The neighbour cache may well list every entry as having the address
   0.170. This is due to a problem that I need to sort out kernel side.
   It is harmless (but don't try and use neigh add yet) just look in
   /proc/net/decnet_neigh to see the real addresses for now.

 o The rtnetlink support in the kernel is rather exprimental, expect a
   few odd things to happen for the next few DECnet kernel releases.

 o Whilst you can use ip addr add to add more than one DECnet address to an
   interface, don't expect addresses which are not the same as the
   kernels node address to work properly. i.e. You will break the DECnet
   protocol if you do add anything other than the automatically generated
   interface addresses to ethernet cards. This option is there for future
   link layer support, where the device will have to be configed for
   DECnet explicitly.

 o The DECnet support is currently self contained. You do not need the
   libdnet library to use it. In fact until I've sent the dnet_pton and
   dnet_ntop functions to Patrick to add, you can't use libdnet.

 o If you are not using the very latest 2.3.xx series kernels, don't
   try and list DECnet routes if you've got IPv6 compiled into the
   kernel. It will oops.

 o My main reason for writing the DECnet support for iproute2 was to
   check out the DECnet routing code, so the route get and
   route show cache commands are likely to be the most debugged out of
   all of them.

 o If you find bugs in the DECnet support, please send them to me in the
   first instance, and then I'll send Alexey a patch to fix it. IPv4/6
   bugs should be sent to Alexey as before.

Steve Whitehouse <SteveW@ACM.org>