Re: [gentoo-server] New GSDS snapshot - network discovery

[Sandy McArthur]

Eric Sammer wrote:
> comments regarding design would be great.

I'm fond of Zeroconf and was pleased to see a mention in section 2.4 of 
gsds_specification.txt . I think it's generally a good idea but you may 
want to accomidate people who don't want to use it. Some large scale 
deployments may want to use a more centerally controled setup.

Zeroconf is really a collection of [draft] standards. What you're really 
intersted in is DNS Service Discovery [DNS-SD] which can work with the 
existing DNS infrastructure. Or when combined with Multicast DNS [mDNS] 
it can work in a more ad-hoc manner. The latter is what most people 
think of when you say Zeroconf/Rendezvous(TM) even though there is more 
to Zeroconf than service discovery.

I think DNS-SD over normal DNS first, falling back to mDNS would be a 
good idea. Old skool admins will probably prefer the control of DNS-SD 
over DNS and would enabled the GSDS server to live somewhere other than 
the local subnet. mDNS doesn't work across subnets without a proxy 
responder which would suck when you want to deploy a machine in the next 
subnet.


While I'm talking about Zeroconf let me plug Howl which has recently 
been added to the portage tree at net-misc/howl. Unlike the Apple's 
Posix mDNS/DNS-SD implementation it can take dynamic updates from 
clients. Apple's Posix implementation currently requires you to edit a 
config file and restart the daemon for any changes to take effect. It's 
really designed for embeded devices who's service list won't change 
frequently.

DNS-SD:	http://www.dns-sd.org/
mDNS:	http://www.multicastdns.org/
Howl: http://porchdogsoft.com/products/howl/

... and my page about Zeroconf http://sandy.mcarthur.org/code/zeroconf/

I hope that made sense, I've written it in lots of little free moments 
thoughout the day.

Sandy McArthur