[Kroupware] Automatic server discovery

[Brad Hards]

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G'day all,

Congratulations to the kroupware team on getting the contract.

A suggestion that can probably help reduce admin load (and hence TCO) is 
automatic discovery of the servers (ie the kolab). This would mean that when 
the user first logs in, the kroupware mail client would issue a query for 
"smptd", and would receive the URI.  This could be done again on each login, 
or when the previous gateway fails (eg because the user is on a laptop, and 
moved to a different network).

There is some existing technology that does this - eg kprinter can discover 
CUPS printers automagically, and Konqueror can get its PAC files without 
needing to be told from, see: 
http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdelibs/kio/misc/kpac.

However the best design I've come across is SLPv2 (RFC2608). KDE recently 
started using it - see krdc and krfb. As an example: 
http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdenetwork/krfb/srvloc/
Tim Jansen (who is the krdc and krfb author) is planning to incorporate the 
service location stuff into kdelibs for KDE 3.2.

It uses OpenSLP (http://www.openslp.org), which also runs on Windows (although 
the unix support is much, much better). There is a standard API for service 
location (RFC2609).

It'd be seriously impressive if Kroupware required zero configuration, and 
just worked.

What do you think?

Brad
- -- 
http://conf.linux.org.au. 22-25Jan2003. Perth, Aust. Tickets booked.
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