Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!mailrus!husc6!ddl
From: ddl@husc6.harvard.edu (Dan Lanciani)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: Re: KIP/K-Star
Keywords: IP SUBNET LOCALTALK KSTART KIP
Message-ID: <374@husc6.harvard.edu>
Date: 20 Sep 88 22:40:24 GMT
References: <858@hub.ucsb.edu>
Organization: Harvard University, Cambridge MA
Lines: 26

In article <858@hub.ucsb.edu>, aks@hydra.ucsb.edu ( ) writes:
> I would like to understand why (apparently both) KIP and K-Star do not
> support the ability to treat the Localtalk network as an IP subnet AND
> provide the directed, encapsulated IP feature?

	I made some changes to KIP to allow the LocalTalk segment to
be an ip subnet rather than an extension of the ethernet that the Kbox
is on.  The ip address of the subnet is read from the atalkatab database
in one of the "spare" fields.  There are some limitations.  First,
the KIP code seems to like 8 bits of host and I made no attempt to fight
this trend.  If you have a net mask of other than 255.255.255.0 you
will have problems.  Second, I didn't fix ip routing itself to understand
subnets, so proxy arp from other gateways on a backbone would still be
required.  (I think someone else has fixed this, but it was unnecessary
for us since our gateways need to do proxy arp anyway.)  The Kbox
will, in turn, do proxy arp for its own subnet.  If this isn't clear,
think of the Kbox as a gateway that knows the subnet of its LocalTalk
cable but assumes that all other subnets are directly connected to
its ethernet interface.  Third, I did not add a RIP process to
KIP (and it may well not fit) so you need to run a RIP spoofer on
some other host so that hosts that *do* understand subnets will
route to the Kbox.  If this sounds useful given all the stated
restrictions, I will make it available.

				Dan Lanciani
				ddl@harvard.*