ZeroConf
So today I saw mention of ZeroConf with libhowl by Marco d'Itri.
Seemed like a nice idea and today is a slow day, so I installed it.
There's a server which is in charge of handling the services which are published and a couple of tools for publishing services and querying them.
All seemed good:
Install:
apt-get install libhowl0 howl-utils mdnsresponder
The service gets started and we can publish something:
skx@undecided:~$ mDNSPublish gnump3d _http._tcp 8888
From the same machine we can then query:
skx@undecided:~$ mDNSResolve gnump3d http
resolve reply: 0x2 gnump3d http local. 192.168.1.50 8888
Looks good, I've "published" the existance of a service called GNUMP3d which is running on port 8888 and then queried it.
Lets try the same thing from another machine. Oh dear it all breaks.
When running the query on another machine I first see a "connection refused" message, so I realise that I have to start a deamon on that machine too.
Hmmm that seems weird I thought all the machines found out from the central server? OK install the mdnsresponder too, try again?
Nope. Since there is nothing registered on the local mdnsresponder no results come back.
I can't help hoping I've missed something obvious, because if so I could add zeroconf support to Jabber, but it looks like nothign is working across machines