Last updated by Peter Wang on 18 Feb 2003


Libnet

Welcome to the home of Libnet!

Hosted by SourceForge.Net -- click to go to our project page

The purpose of this page is to provide information about Libnet. We have included links to some other networking libraries. Our goal is to provide a simple, not overly complicated, networking library for various platforms.

Well here is the useful stuff:

Download

You can download Libnet in either .zip or .tar.gz format. The .zip archives are intended for use on DOS systems -- they're in DOS text format and include batch files for compilation on Windows compilers. The .tar.gz files are primarily for Unix systems -- in Unix text format, and without all the batch files. They may be OK for use on DOS/Windows compilers; it depends what sort of utilities you have available. The .zip archives should work fine on Unix systems, if you convert the files to Unix format.

All archives include all the documentation.

This download section was too much hassle to maintain, so I'm not going to do it any more -- see the project download page for new and old versions.

Documentation

The full documentation is included in the archives, in various formats (plain text, Info, HTML and Texinfo source), but if you want to browse the HTML rendering online now then you can do so here.

Note that this online version is from Libnet 0.10.1, so is a little out of date.

Latest News

18 Feb 2003 -- by Peter Wang
George isn't in at the moment, please leave a message after the beep. In the meantime, I've zipped up the changes since 0.10.10 to make the 0.10.11 release. In particular, people were having problems compiling with gcc 3.x, which had been fixed a long time ago but wasn't packaged up. Otherwise, there were some bug fixes and so on. Note that this release hasn't had a lot of testing, so please report any problems.

06 Aug 2001 -- by George Foot
I've deleted the news which was over a year old (that's all of it). The web page no longer lists old downloads because it's too much hassle to move them from canvaslink -- if you want something old, try the project page on SourceForge or email me.

What is Libnet?

Libnet is a generic networking API that provides access to several protocols. It is not designed as a 'all in one' solution to networking. Currently many features that are common in some network protocols are not available with Libnet, such as streaming via TCP/IP. We feel that Libnet should not provide specific features that are possible in other protocols. If we restrict Libnet to the minimal needed to communicate (datagram/packets) then this allows it to support more interfaces.

What does it support?

Libnet supports the following platforms and compilers:

Other platforms should be fairly easy to support, especially if GNU CC and GNU Make will run on them.

Libnet supports UDP/IP on Unix, Windows, and, provided the Winsock is not version .0 or greater, in a DOS box under Windows. It supports IPX in DOS, Windows, and Unix, and serial linking in DOS, Windows, Unix, and BeOS. On all platforms there is a `localhost' driver which is a sort of internal loopback device (not for communicating between processes though).

What protocols will it support?

Support for Winsock 2 in DOS is very awkward, and nobody seems very inclined to add plain DOS internet support. Porting the internet and IPX drivers to BeOS would be nice.

Contact information

Links


Last updated by Peter Wang on 18 Feb 2003

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