Nortel Netlock VPN Client

[Reddan, Charles G]

By the way, this isn't a Fedora issue per se... It appears to me 
to be a specific kernel update issue, which the NetLock vendor 
simply hasn't kept up-to-date with. It stopped working for me 
at the same time as some changes to 'skbuff.h' that went in with 
2.4.22 in the base (non-Redhat-modified) kernel, when running a 
custom kernel with RH9. 

Looking around at the time, I found that the 'skbuff' data 
structure changed in 2.4.22 and beyond when a new structure 
definition
	struct  net_device   *real_dev;
was inserted in the MIDDLE of the existing sk_buff structure, 
displacing anything (e.g., various control structures) that lay 
beyond that point in the original skbuff structure. The binary-only 
portion of the Netlock client naturally would not have spontaneously 
changed itself at the same time, so it would be using now-invalid 
offsets within the skbuff structure when *it* tries to manipulate 
these buffers.

So, the compilable "shim" for the Netlock client still compiled ok, 
but it isn't the only part of the VPN client. At bootup time, if the
binary Netlock client modules were loaded (need not actually be in use) 
I'd get a mess of 
	"No more skbuff" 
messages within a minute or two, followed by failure. I dropped back 
to a 2.4.21 kernel and it works happily with that... even now on 
Fedora.

Looking at NetLock's (now Apani's) web site, their most recent release 
(3.0 at the start of this year) of the product is said to work with 
RH9 and Suse 8.2. The more recent version of Suse (9.0) is NOT listed 
as supported, and since its supplied kernel version includes that same 
update to skbuff.h, I am not surprised. Hopefully someone at Apani
is planning to recompile the binary-only portion of their code with 
a more recent kernel someday. 

Chuck R.