SCTP API

[Matthias Lang]

Valentin writes:
 > Doing SCTP alone does not help much, and yet, all sorts of different efforts
 > will cover it good enough.  I think that we should move focus up to M3UA.

Knowing Vance's background, he's probably thinking the same thing you
are: he wants to get at SS7. And then you really want M3UA or M2UA, or
both, depending on how much of the stack you want to implement "the
hard way" and how much you want to implement in Erlang.

But SCTP can be used for something of much wider interest: make Erlang
distribution work well over duplicated networks (for redundancy), and
then it has nothing to do with M3UA. Per Bergqvist presented an
interesting hack at an EUC a few years ago:

  http://www.erlang.se/euc/01/Bergqvist2001/sld011.htm

With SCTP you could the same thing "properly". It's just a shame that
the linux versions appear* to be so buggy that the risk of SCTP
causing a crash seems greater than the risk of a non-redundant network
failing. Maybe SUN will lead the way.

Matthias

Linux SCTP implementation #1: www.openss7.org
Linux SCTP implementation #2: http://sourceforge.net/projects/lksctp