[WLANware] SNMP plugin for OSLR - GSoC 2011

[Marek Lindner]

Hi Ambarish, Mitar,

I am the current maintainer & co-author of ap51-flash (original author was 
Sven-Ola) and I also kicked off ap51-flash-ng. If you have questions regarding 
these tools simply direct them to me.

ap51-flash-ng is an intermediate name for the project until it can fully 
replace ap51-flash. As you correctly pointed out the telnet support is still 
missing but I am working on that.

> I am concerned whether the stack and the tcpdump library are
> cross-platform because I read that uIP has been "ported" to
> windows.That made me think what if we were running a platform it
> wasn't ported to , then the flasher wouldn't work on it. Further , as
> far as my knowledge goes ,we need to have Winpcap for windows like
> libpcap.

ap51-flash-ng will no longer depend on libpcap because it simply is not 
necessary. All we need is socket_open(), socket_write(), socket_read() and 
socket_close(). These functions have been abstracted in socket.c and can be 
easily ported. All other function already are cross-platform today - no need 
for additional porting or libpcap.
In general, having the user to install libcap proved to be more of a burden 
than a solution. In addition ap51-flash suffered from strange bugs due to 
libpcap on 64bit systems.


> So, how would this work?Do we try to find the firmware image or
> download it from somewhere in the background?

The firmware image can be compiled into the flash tool as binary data. When you 
use ap51-flash(-ng) all the user has to do is specifying the network interface.


> > ap-51 tool is a flash tool I would use as as example, not directly
> > build on it. Probably rent some code, but refactor/redo it at the same
> > time, do things more modular and so on.

Why not focusing all effort on a single tool ? Dividing resources does not seem 
like a good idea.


> Further I have got the uIP stack source to familiarize myself with it.

Although the uIP stack is nice when you try to get off the ground fast but when 
you encounter bugs it is rather cumbersome to debug. Furthermore it can't 
handle more than a single TCP session at a time. Therefore ap51-flash-ng has 
its own TCP stack.

Regards,
Marek