North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Anyone using uvlan out there?

  • From: Deepak Jain
  • Date: Thu Sep 13 17:58:25 2007


How does it work?
Using the libpcap (winpcap for windows users) library, uvlan listens to a specific ethernet device. If a broadcast frame is seen, then it is sent off to all the peers so they can add it to their records and emit the broadcast on their local network. Once this happens, the device (computer, router, gaming console, etc) which sent the broadcast will be known by all the peers and remote machines will know of the device's existance and how to route traffic to it.

I'd be very concerned if you had a lot of machines running on the same side of a hardware switch and all were "nodes"... they'd replicate all the broadcast frames and n^2 plus the hardware switch's contribution :). Sounds like a problem for machines that are reasonably close together and/or large implementations of these.


Kind of cool otherwise.

Deepak