In Linux, the socket library is part of the standard libc C library. It supports the AF_INET and AF_INET6 sockets for TCP/IP and AF_UNIX for Unix domain sockets. It also supports AF_IPX for Novell's network protocols, AF_X25 for the X.25 network protocol, AF_ATMPVC and AF_ATMSVC for the ATM network protocol and AF_AX25, AF_NETROM, and AF_ROSE sockets for Amateur Radio protocol support. Other protocol families are being developed and will be added in time.
UUCP Networks
Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) started out as a package of programs that transferred files over serial lines, scheduled those transfers, and initiated execution of programs on remote sites. It has undergone major changes since its first implementation in the late seventies, but it is still rather spartan in the services it offers. Its main application is still in Wide Area Networks, based on periodic dialup telephone links.
UUCP was first developed by Bell Laboratories in 1977 for communication between their Unix development sites. In mid-1978, this network already connected over 80 sites. It was running email as an application, as well as remote printing. However, the system's central use was in distributing new software and bug fixes. Today, UUCP is not confined solely to the Unix environment. There are free and commercial ports available for a variety of platforms, including AmigaOS, DOS, and Atari's TOS.
One of the main disadvantages of UUCP networks is that they operate in batches. Rather than having a permanent connection established between hosts, it uses temporary connections. A UUCP host machine might dial in to another UUCP host only once a day, and then only for a short period of time. While it is connected, it will transfer all of the news, email, and files that have been queued, and then disconnect. It is this queuing that limits the sorts of applications that UUCP can be applied to. In the case of email, a user may prepare an email message and post it. The message will stay queued on the UUCP host machine until it dials in to another UUCP host to transfer the message. This is fine for network services such as email, but is no use at all for services such as rlogin.
Despite these limitations, there are still many UUCP networks operating all over the world, run mainly by hobbyists, which offer private users network access at reasonable prices. The main reason for the longtime popularity of UUCP was that it was very cheap compared to having your computer directly connected to the Internet. To make your computer a UUCP node, all you needed was a modem, a working UUCP implementation, and another UUCP node that was willing to feed you mail and news. Many people were prepared to provide UUCP feeds to individuals because such connections didn't place much demand on their existing network.
We cover the configuration of UUCP in a chapter of its own later in the book, but we won't focus on it too heavily, as it's being replaced rapidly with TCP/IP, now that cheap Internet access has become commonly available in most parts of the world.
Linux Networking
As it is the result of a concerted effort of programmers around the world, Linux wouldn't have been possible without the global network. So it's not surprising that in the early stages of development, several people started to work on providing it with network capabilities. A UUCP implementation was running on Linux almost from the very beginning, and work on TCP/IP-based networking started around autumn 1992, when Ross Biro and others created what has now become known as Net-1.
After Ross quit active development in May 1993, Fred van Kempen began to work on a new implementation, rewriting major parts of the code. This project was known as Net-2. The first public release, Net-2d, was made in the summer of 1993 (as part of the 0.99.10 kernel), and has since been maintained and expanded by several people, most notably Alan Cox.[8] Alan's original work was known as Net-2Debugged. After heavy debugging and numerous improvements to the code, he changed its name to Net-3 after Linux 1.0 was released. The Net-3 code was further developed for Linux 1.2 and Linux 2.0. The 2.2 and later kernels use the Net-4 version network support, which remains the standard official offering today.
The Net-4 Linux Network code offers a wide variety of device drivers and advanced features. Standard Net-4 protocols include SLIP and PPP (for sending network traffic over serial lines), PLIP (for parallel lines), IPX (for Novell compatible networks, which we'll discuss in Chapter 15, IPX and the NCP Filesystem), Appletalk (for Apple networks) and AX.25, NetRom, and Rose (for amateur radio networks). Other standard Net-4 features include IP firewalling, IP accounting (discussed later in Chapter 9, TCP/IP Firewall and Chapter 10, IP Accounting), and IP Masquerade (discussed later in Chapter 11, IP Masquerade and Network Address Translation. IP tunnelling in a couple of different flavors and advanced policy routing are supported. A very large variety of Ethernet devices is supported, in addition to support for some FDDI, Token Ring, Frame Relay, and ISDN, and ATM cards.
Additionally, there are a number of other features that greatly enhance the flexibility of Linux. These features include an implementation of the SMB filesystem, which interoperates with applications like lanmanager and Microsoft Windows, called Samba, written by Andrew Tridgell, and an implementation of the Novell NCP (NetWare Core Protocol).[9]
Different Streaks of Development
There have been, at various times, varying network development efforts active for Linux.
Fred continued development after Net-2Debugged was made the official network implementation. This development led to the Net-2e, which featured a much revised design of the networking layer. Fred was working toward a standardized Device Driver Interface (DDI), but the Net-2e work has ended now.
Yet another implementation of TCP/IP networking came from Matthias Urlichs, who wrote an ISDN driver for Linux and FreeBSD. For this driver, he integrated some of the BSD networking code in the Linux kernel. That project, too is no longer being worked on.
There has been a lot of rapid change in the Linux kernel networking implementation, and change is still the watchword as development continues. Sometimes this means that changes also have to occur in other software, such as the network configuration tools. While this is no longer as large a problem as it once was, you may still find that upgrading your kernel to a later version means that you must upgrade your network configuration tools, too. Fortunately, with the large number of Linux distributions available today, this is a quite simple task.
The Net-4 network implementation is now quite mature and is in use at a very large number of sites around the world. Much work has been done on improving the performance of the Net-4 implementation, and it now competes with the best implementations available for the same hardware platforms. Linux is proliferating in the Internet Service Provider environment, and is often used to build cheap and reliable World Wide Web servers, mail servers, and news servers for these sorts of organizations. There is now sufficient development interest in Linux that it is managing to keep abreast of networking technology as it changes, and current releases of the Linux kernel offer the next generation of the IP protocol, IPv6, as a standard offering.