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fpga_net_1_l.jpg In my day to day business I work with Software Defined Networking (SDN) a lot. Especially with Open-Flow, Open-vSwitch and some commercial products.

Most of the time the projects are not “normal” ones where these techniques are used in larger scenarios like enterprise or data-center networks. Instead I use them on the other side of the scale in embedded environments for example to develop Space based satellite routers.

At the time of this writing we now have almost eight weeks lock-down due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. This means no travel time to my office and instead working from home. So this spare time must be filled with some experiments. Unfortunately at home I don’t have the resources I normally have at my workplace. So no fancy, multi k-euro development boards and tools. Wanting an embedded system with at least two Ethernet interfaces I looked around in my electronic junkyard and found some interesting components which might give a not so bad platform for some networking experiments. Especially low level Ethernet packet handling (filtering, modifying) is on of my interests. Maybe playing with P4, NetCope, or P4FPGA without spending a fortune.

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