udpcast

There is a new improved boot loader, based on busybox. The flags --min-client, --min-wait, --max-wait, and --nokbd have been added for unattended udp-sender operation. Kernel 2.4.21 is now used. This release can boot from a single floppy disk, rather than two. There are miscellaneous bugfixes and minor feature improvements.

socklib was fixed so that it no longer requires the presence of the in_addr_t
type. The --mcast-addr flag was ignored in previous version, and has now been
fixed. A new --mcast-all-addr flag was added in order to override the default
broadcast/multicast address used for finding peers.

This release has a state machine bugfix for FEC mode. Poin to point mode is now the default if only one receiver is detected. in_addr_t type has been removed in order to make it possible to compile udpcast on older Linux versions. It uses a default slize size of 112 blocks for full-duplex mode (rather than 19), does initialization by the boot loader of the socket receive buffer to 1 Megabyte, rather than the default of 64K, has improved (adaptative) retransmit timeout handling, and half-duplex mode is now the default, rather than full-duplex as it used to be.

A multicast mode was implemented. This uses ethernet multicast to send only to
those machines running a receiver, rather than broadcasting to all machines.
An optional asynchronous mode was added for situations where no return channel
from the receiver back to the sender is available or where the latency is too
high. With this, the sender does not rely on acknowledgments sent by receiver.
Forward error correction was also added. This transmits redundant information,
enabling receivers to locally reconstruct data which has been lost in transit.

This release has been updated for SuSE 7.1. New
additions are the ability to choose on which
network interface to broadcast (command line
version), the ability to choose partition to
broadcast/receive (bootable version), and the
ability to boot from CD rather than floppy. The
web page has been rewritten to make it more clear
and less redundant.