Hello, I'm now exploring the eth-multiplexer project written by Zheng. AFAICT, the aim of this project is to provide a much more flexible network strategy by allowing new virtual devices and filters and by dispatching the packets received via a (single) physical device to corresponding clients connected to one of the virtual devices.
My problem is, in short, the following: I follow this HOWTO: http://www.bddebian.com:8888/~hurd-web/user/zhengda/howto/ and setup the devnode, eth-multiplexer, and modified pfinet translators. When I try to do lookups under the multiplexer's virtual filesystem, everything works okay, which makes me think that both the devnode and eth-multiplexer are (at least) alive. When I try to gracefully settrans -g the pfinet translator, it quietly goes away, without messages like "Device busy" which occur when translators hang. However, when I do apt-get update, it (very slowly) fetches me ~800B, then hangs for around 6-7 minutes and then stops with warnings and errors about failures in fetching data. Taking into consideration that neither antrik (running Hurd on bare metal) nor Zheng (running Hurd not in QEMU) experience no problems of the kind, and, moreover, when antrik tried the exact sequence of commands I had used, it worked for him, I suspect QEMU's user-space network of getting into the way of eth-multiplexer in my case. I put much hope into my old box, but I forgot that it had some weird software RAID stuff embedded into the motherboard, which I cannot turn off. When I tried to install Debian Hurd on this box, the installation system could not detect my hard drives at all. antrik suggested trying a different virtualization solution, so I'm asking whether anybody could recommend me something suitable, since I'd prefer not to grope in ignorance for something which is actually unreachable. Also, I remember Zheng having been given an account on flubber (I hope I remember things well) last summer and I wonder whether it is possible for me to get an account too :-) Anyways, the main question here is whether this solution is suitable for testing eth-multiplexer. What worries me most about this idea is the fact that Zheng *still* uses a local virtualization solution, instead of his remote account, which might mean that eth-multiplexer has problems running on public hurd boxen... Regards, scolobb
