Last updated by Peter Wang on 18 Feb 2003
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.
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.
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Note that this online version is from Libnet 0.10.1, so is a little out of date.
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.
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).
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.
