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Tips on Bringing Up a UNIX Network Driver

If you’ve never brought up a network driver on a UNIX operating system before, you’ll want to learn about the tools you can use to set up interfaces, test packet transmission and reception, and gather information. Detailed documentation of these tools is outside the scope of this manual, but you can always use the UNIX man command to display the standard system manual pages in a Terminal window.

This chapter assumes you’re using two machines to bring up your driver, one that has your driver, and the other to act as a source or destination for network traffic. “Figure 3-1” shows a typical setup, with the ethernet and IP addresses that will be used. The machine that contains your driver will be referred to as the target. The second machine is typically the machine you use to debug your driver, and will be referred to here as the debug host.

The IP addresses shown are merely examples. If you are debugging on the wider network (which is not recommended), you should use legal IP addresses for that network. If you are debugging over a private link between the two machines, you can choose any IP addresses, as long as you set up static address binding as shown below.

Contents:

Activating the Network Link
Testing I/O
Testing Statistics-Gathering
Unloading the Driver

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