[Click] Suggestions for site & click

[Jonathan Day]

Hi,

First off, I know people have written modules for
Click. I've stumbled across them, by accident. They're
better-hidden than most pirate treasure.

It would be nice if there could be some master index
of who has which module for what version of which
routing protocol. Authors could post to the index, and
users could then make use of them. Sort-of a freshmeat
for Click.

Secondly, I know that Click supports Exopc and Linux.
But how do they compare? And under what conditions?
How does Click compare to other modular routers, in
terms of size, speed and stability? Does Zebra run it
over, or vice versa?

Moving on to Click itself, there are some things I'd
really like to see...

1. Get rid of DES for IPSec. IPSec is not just DES, it
can use any encryption scheme that has been OKed by
the standards maintainers and allocated values to on
the encryption type field.

Have a generic encryption module, and then perhaps
have that call a generic DES. Alternatively, just use
a librarry (eg: gcrypt, mcrypt) that already do this.

2. Reverse-engineer some code from Netfilter + the
Layer 7 patches + Linux' QoS

There's some good code in there, covering a lot of QoS
and packet mangling features Click doesn't have. If
Click can't call or use the routines when linked to
Linux, then they might as well not be there. When
using Exopc, they aren't.

4. Add a courple more architectures to the list.

It would be cool if OSKit, Plan9, OpenBSD and perhaps
even a low-level version for the GPL'ed Leon2
microprocessor. The APT group even has software
that'll let you design a completely hardware modular
router using the Click code.

(A router on a chip would get a lot of attention.)

LEON2: http://www.gaisler.com/
APT: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/apt/index.html

5. Directories aren't evil

It's hard to tell the different types and sub-types of
element, if they're all in the same directory. There's
some organizing that could usefully be done, there.

Jonathan Day



__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam
http://mail.yahoo.com