zeroconf and lisa, Was: removing more stuff for KDE 4 :-)

[Alexander Neundorf]

Hi,

On Saturday 04 June 2005 14:35, you wrote:
> Dnia piątek, 3 czerwca 2005 23:42, Alexander Neundorf napisał:
> > On Friday 03 June 2005 22:45, Stephan Kulow wrote:
> > ...
> >
> > > So you prefer having something broken and not supported over something
> > > missing?
> >
> > I'd say lanbrowsing should stay for 3.5 (it's not broken, has users, and
> > works). For 4.0 we'll have something better.
>
> For 4.0 I plan to enhance current zeroconf implementation to support
> several machine and service discovery methods and incorporating bits of lan
> ioslave as one of 'backends'.
> Work is being done in branches/work/dnssd/multiengine. It still uses Qt3
> and is still API compatible with 3.4 version but i'm going to drop that and
> move over to Qt4 as i don't see any chance of making it usable for 3.5.

What do you exactly plan ?
The lisa daemon and kio_lan are quite mature I'd say but have some "issues".

Cons:
-the lisa daemon has to be started with root privileges in order to be able to 
open a raw socket for sending ICMP echo request
-it has to be configured manually. But I think this is supported quite good 
now in the kcm module.
-it searches for hosts by sending ICMP echo request regularly. This can cause 
some network load. 

Pros:
-root privileges are dropped immediately after opening the raw socket
-the update interval increases up to 16 times the standard interval if the 
information isn't accessed
-if there are more than one lisa daemons running in one network, they 
cooperate and only one of them does the searching, the other get their 
information from this one host
-works completely without samba
-it doesn't intermix different functionality like samba does: file sharing and 
"host browsing": file sharing via ssh/ftp/nfs/http, "host browsing" via lisa

As far as I understand dnssd (can we come up with a better name ? "Buongiorno" 
or something ;-), it could provide a tree structure where the root is the 
service type and the hosts are the leaves. Lisa does the opposite: the hosts 
are the root and each one offers various services. I don't know which one is 
better.
Using zeroconf every linux/*BSD/Mac/... host could advertize itself as "host 
running something" and then it could be browsed. Or they could advertize as 
"host running ssh" and we could have a "ssh-network" to browse and a 
smb-network to browse (from the smb-ioslave obviously). HTTP and FTP should 
also be supported in some way.

Please let me know what you plan and if I can support you :-)

Bye
Alex
-- 
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