1This program uses Forward Error Correction (FEC) based on Vandermonde (VDM) 2matrices to recover lost blocks of files. Its primary application is 3intended to be in recovering data from unreliable media such as diskettes. 4(Note that you must write the data to the diskette using this program 5in the first place in order to be able to recover the data!) 6 7To install, configure and make install. Three programs are copied into 8$bindir: 9 vdmfec 10 vdm_encode 11 vdm_decode 12these files are all hard links to each other, the latter being equivalent 13to calling 'vdmfec -d'. 14 15CFLAGS and LDFLAGS default to -O3 and -s, resp. For debugging you might 16want to 'configure CFLAGS="-O2 -g" LDFLAGS=""'. 17 18The Notes file gives the file format. 19 20VDMFEC is based on the Vandermonde FEC C code written by Luigi Rizzo. 21The home page for fec.c is http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/fec.html 22 23The files README.fec, fec.3, fec.c, fec.h, and fec_ccr.ps.gz are from 24Rizzo's 980624 distribution, sans assembly code, and with a few changes 25to make for better autoconfiguration. The vdmfec code will only work 26with GF_BITS=8 (because the block id is stored as a byte). 27