[larkost]

I am starting work on an idea, but my idea requires that I be able to do some simple networking on an interface (an ethernet port) without TCP/IP. I know that this is possible using MAC addresses, but need some pointers to that sort of information. If anyone has experience in this sort of thing I would love to hear from you on it.

What I need is the following:

• Send and receive simple broadcast packets
• Send and receive simple point-to-point packets

These can easily be UDP sort of packets (as in no delivery notifications), and can be very small. I do need to be able to send them from both interfaces that have TCP fully setup, and to ones that have no assigned IP address. I probably need to do this in C, possibly C++ (for later portability), but if I actually make it out of the concept phase and into code, I will be happy to start out MacOS X proprietary, so the pointers can be specific to MacOS X.

[wadesworld]

You'd likely have to write your own network driver. I don't think any of the standard protocol stacks give you direct access to layer 2 functions.

See the "Writing Network Kernel Extensions" (or something to that effect) on developer.apple.com

Wade