[SqNOS] Networking is comming to a theater close to you!

[Gerardo Richarte]

    Hey! I'm really happy you finally compiled it!

    For everybody else trying to compile: there are a few things missing
in the C sources. The main thing is the FFI support files, which I took
from the unix branch of Squeak, with no modifications (as far as I
remember). Then, some other mods in nos/* (not really sure though), a
small change in the Makefile, and of course, including the FFIPlugin as
internal plugin with VMMaker.
    I will make a new .iso release next week, but if anybody wants to
compile this intermediate version, just send me emails, and I'll send
everything to the list. 
> Looks like using "self buffer unsignedByteAt:" is the way to go for a
> quick snoop of the buffer.  In the following list bytes 7 to 12
> perfectly match the source MAC address.  I used something like "*1 to:
> 256 do: [index | Transcript show: (self buffer unsignedByteAt:index) ;
> cr.]."*
    HEh! this is supper cool. The buffer (there will be a #message
method to access it), contains a raw ethernet packet. In this case, I
was expecting an ARP request, but this is an IP packet.
Ethernet packet has 6+6+2 bytes. The first 6 are the destination MAC
address (broadcast in this case, as it's an ARP request), next 6 for
source MAC address, and 2 for the type (in this case 0x800, which is
IP). Take a look at this funny article we wrote a while back:
http://community.corest.com/~luciano/text/quake/... did you ping a
broadcast address? (.255)

    IP's specification is here: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0791.txt
    Ethernet packets are described here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Resolution_Protocol#Packet_structure
    ARP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Resolution_Protocol#Packet_structure

    Luciano continued working on the Packets since we wrote the article
(and before that), and he has a more complete implementation of the
TCP/IP protocol suite (more complete is not "complte", it's just more
complete than then :-) He's kind of working on a version of it that we
can incorporate in SqueakNOS. At the time he did it using Craig's Flow
and Conduits, which are not yet part of the standard Squeak. We know
that Asparagi is interested in working in Flow again, so we may have
good news from that side too!

    gera