ZeroConf Support Progress

Blog post by majie on Mon, 2009-07-20 16:33
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Hi guys.

Sorry for no update in the previous weeks.

I'v made some progress. mDNSResponder, which provides the underlying ZeroConf functionalities, has been ported to Haiku. It runs on Haiku correctly. In order to make it run, minor updates in our network stack were also applied.

I'm currently working on the service browser. It is almost finished. I'm also trying to write some wrapper classes so developers who need ZeroConf features can easily use them. And my mentor Axel is working on an update to our DNS resolver. After the update we will write some code that can resolve ".local" domains. So in the future you can directly type "http://webserver.local/" in your Web browser. Without any configuration it will resolve it and take you there.

OK. Stop here. Thank you. :-)

Comments

Re: ZeroConf Support Progress

by Bruno Brocoli - 2009-07-20 19:53

Ah that sounds good... very good.

It means I dunno need a web server like apache, xitami, or poorman to test some code in the browser? If so it is a very welcomed enhancement. About mDNSResponder and ZeroConf i have no clue what it is about, but sounds very important for the network. Maybe someone will explain it for me?

Anyway, http://webserver.local is cool...

Thank you too...

Re: ZeroConf Support Progress

by GeneralMaximus - 2009-07-20 20:39

ZeroConf stands for "Zero Configuration Networking". As usual, Wikipedia has way too much to say about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeroconf

Example: If you use Mac OS X, you might already have used ZeroConf networking without even knowing about it. Connect a few Macs to the same network and launch iTunes on each of them. You'll find that you can access all the iTunes libraries from any one of the Macs (they appear as <USERNAME>'s Library in the sidebar). Apple does not allow you to copy music from one library to another, but you can easily stream it over the network.

Safari and iChat can also do fun things with ZeroConf. You can share bookmarks and have audio/video chats with people on the same network without messing with settings or having to edit complex configuration files.

I hope people use this implementation well. Avahi on Linux is painfully underused.

Re: ZeroConf Support Progress

by majie - 2009-07-21 07:49
General Maximus wrote:

I hope people use this implementation well. Avahi on Linux is painfully underused.

This is what I'm worried about.

Re: ZeroConf Support Progress

by jaxs - 2009-07-20 22:39

What excellent news! Once you get .local it's hard to go back.

I'm curious if you're using the dns_sd API?

Re: ZeroConf Support Progress

by majie - 2009-07-21 07:56
jaxs wrote:

I'm curious if you're using the dns_sd API?

Yes. I'm using the DNS-SD API. Besides my wrapper classes, the original API is also available.

Re: ZeroConf Support Progress

by jaxs - 2009-07-21 10:19
majie wrote:

Yes. I'm using the DNS-SD API. Besides my wrapper classes, the original API is also available.

Excellent. I think the wrappers will generally be most useful in the long term but the low-level API means a lot. Very good news, thank you!

Re: ZeroConf Support Progress

by fhein - 2009-10-22 19:57

Any progress on this?

Thought it would be nice to port Giver
http://code.google.com/p/giver/