Brief History
The current specification is RSPF version 2.2, written by
Fred Goldstein
K1IO. Until recently, if people were using RSPF at all, they would of
been using RSPF version 2.1, which is available in the NOS program,
written by Phil Karn and others. The RSPF code itself in NOS was
written by Anders Klements.
Now with the knowledge of how his protocol worked in real life, Fred
then updated and improved RSPF to version 2.2. And, until late 1995,
that was all that happened.
What did happen was that I was in my senior years in my undergraduate
degree at
University of Technology, Sydney
and looking for an interesting Thesis. After seeing emails from Carl
Makin VK1KCM asking if anyone was going to fix RSPF in NOS, this gave me
my idea for my Thesis.
Current versions of RSPFd
Soon after graduating, rspfd-0.04 was released for everyone to try.
This was a package that provided a daemon on Linux that used RSPF v2.2.
After many bug fixes and improvements, we are currently up to release
1.0.
Getting RSPFd
You can either get a stable version of rspfd from
Source Forge Download Site or
the development version from
CVS (Note: the
modulename is rspfd. There is also Debian, SuSE and RedHat packages.
Now there is talk of taking RSPF and making into a more generic
protocol; not just for amateur radio networks but using the things we
have learned from these networks and applying them to wireless networks
in general. We'll wait and see how this turns out.
RSPF Resources
Below is some resources which you may find useful to get more information
about rspf.
RSPF SourceForge Project Page
The Project page has a lot of information about the program itself, such as
open bugs, current versions etc.
RSPF v2.2 Specification
This version of the specification has the same words as the original text version (see below) but is now hopefully a bit easier to read in its HTML format.
RSPF Specification (text)
This is the original place for the plain ASCII text version of the RSPF specification. There is also a HTMLied version by following the link below.
Section 5 of the HAM HOWTO
The HAM HOWTO is an excellent document for find out what is available for the radio amateur. Section 5 describes, amongst other things, the RSPF daemon.
The RSPF FAQ
Here is the most Frequently Asked Questions that I have received about RSPF and the RSPF daemon. Some of these questions and answers are ones I have put in believing that they will be asked. It is a good idea to check the FAQ first before asking a question, the answer may be there!
Last Modified: Wed, 22 Nov 2000
Copyright © 2000 Craig Small
csmall@small.dropbear.id.au