Moving dnssd to kdelibs

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Wednesday 01 December 2004 19:22, Jakub Stachowski wrote:
> Dnia środa, 1 grudnia 2004 18:10, George Staikos napisał:
...
> >    Any ideas about integrating this with KNetAttach?
>
> Yes,  at least for fish, webdav and ftp (and nfs too): there can be listbox
> with found services below Host and Path input fields - similar to krdc.
> It would be something like 10-20 lines of code for each. As far as I know
> gnome-user-share announces _webdav._tcp so it would be even more useful.

I have mixed feelings about knetattach.
Basically it's just an easier way to create url's.
(Can't we have a better name for it ? Why does it live in kdebase and not in  
kdenetwork ?)
Ideally the user would just browse to the location he's interested in instead 
of having to create an url for it (manually or with knetattach). If he wants 
to have a shortcut for this location, he can bookmark it.

The lan browsing daemon was intended to provide just this. Enter one simple 
url (lan:/) and from there you can browse all hosts in your network with all 
their services. But it has its issues. It either pings the hosts or uses 
nmblookup. It it opens the ports to find the available services (only on 
demand for the host the user is currently browsing). 
I don't know much about dnssd, but AFAICT this can be a way to improve the 
situation. Am I right that in order to find a service with dnssd the service 
has to announce itself via dnssd ?
So in order to browse to remote service we have two options:

list the hosts as toplevel, their services as subdirectories to each host
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is what the lisa daemon does. It requires a way to find all hosts at 
first. There are not too many options to find the hosts:
-using smb (requires smb)
-pinging   (requires IP and pinging not blocked)
-NEW: maybe something with dsnssd: 
-each host (configured this way) announces itself as a service, so that dndssd 
can find the hosts by checking for this special service (requires dnssd)
-by checking for available services using dnssd all hosts for all checked 
services are combined and presented as available hosts with their respective 
services as subdirs (requires dnssd for various services)
-the lisa daemon could announce itself as a service ("I can provide a list of 
available hosts"). When a lisa daemon starts, it should check if there is 
another lisa already running (using dnssd) and reuse this one. (this is 
already done since lisa exists, but not using dnssd). (requires dnssd and 
lisa)


list the services as toplevel, the servers as subdirs/files to each service
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-works e.g. with smb, without dnssd
-works for all services announced via dnssd (hmm, not too many rigt now)
-can we create a method to announce more services via dnssd for hosts running 
ssh/http/ftp/... ? So that at least hosts running KDE/Gnome/Linux/UNIX would 
offer all interesting services via dnssd ?
-MAYBE: e.g. for fish: get a list of all hosts from somewhere, and then check 
each host for ssh (I don't think we want to do this)


Now with knetattach avoid this browsing by requiring the user to build an url 
and using this url statically. This is ok for some purposes, but it's not the 
ideal solution to "network browsing". It's ok for creating shortcuts e.g. to 
remote ssh logins or similar things.

How about this as some toplevel directory listing for an ioslave ?

+-local filesystem
|    +/usr
|    +/etc
|
+-smb network
|    |
|    +-<list of hosts/workgroups>
|
+-ssh network
|   |
|   +-<list of hosts>
|
+-rdc network
|   |
|   +-<list of rdc hosts>
|
+-"other network ressources"
    |
    |+-<list of all resources created manually, e.g. using knetattach>


Alternatively:

+-local filesystem
|
+-host 1
|   |
|   +-rdc
|   +-smb
|   +-fish
|
+-host 2 
|   |
|   +-fish
|   +-ftp
|
+-"other network resources"
    |
    +-<list of all resources created manually, e.g. using knetattach>

So what do you think ?

Bye
Alex
-- 
Work: alexander.neundorf at jenoptik.com - http://www.jenoptik-los.de
Home: neundorf at kde.org                - http://www.kde.org
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