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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    DNS based service discovery
From:       Jakub Stachowski <stachowski () hypair ! net>
Date:       2004-10-27 18:14:30
Message-ID: 200410272014.31268.stachowski () hypair ! net
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Hello,

For the last month I have been working on DNS based service discovery 
(ZeroConf, Rendezvous) for KDE. You can get it from kdenonbeta/kdnssd.

Goals are:

- good and simple API for service publishing and discovery
- compatibility with other implementations - MacOSX, GNOME 2.8, Firefox plugin 
(under development). This is why I choose write module for mDNS support 
instead of SLP (and trying to revive knot) - because it seems to be quite 
widespread not only in operating systems and desktop environments but also in 
hardware like network printers and some wireless routers. 
- support for unicast DNS - for discovering services in larger networks and 
over internet
- ioslave - for easy use from file selector, konqueror and sidebar. For now it 
can find ftp and http servers.
- patches for applications like krdc, krfb, kpf applet. Also people doing 
kftpgrabber expressed interest (see comments on 
http://wiki.kdenews.org/tiki-index.php?page=Zeroconf+in+KDE)
- maybe also kooka (networked scanners), kopete, kdessh (I have to ask people 
doing iTerm what ssh servers also publish ZeroConf records) 

As most features are implemented, I think it is good time to show it to KDE 
developers and ask for some comments / suggestions / critique / flames / 
answers on following issues: 

- my goal is to have kdnssd included in KDE - what do you think about it? 
"useful enough to be bugfixed and included" , " try again in several months" 
or "it sucks, just drop it" ? And if answer is "include", do you think it can 
be done in KDE 3.4?

- I consider good API as priority ( and would hate to lower high KDE 
standards) - what should be improved?
- there are already bits of SLP support (in krdc and kinetd) - should it be 
left as is, replaced with ZeroConf or both should be supported (for browsing, 
I suppose one standard has to be chosen for service publishing)

There are still 3 significant improvements to be done (+ testing/bugfixing of 
course):

- IPv6 support - with unicast DNS it should be no problem, but I have yet no 
idea how to do it in libhowl (form multicast DNS)
- possibility to choose one network interface for service publishing - but 
KNetworkInterface is still placeholder and awaits choosing real 
implementation 
- dynamic updates for dnssd:/ ioslave - just like local directories are 
updated by KDirWatch. This is big job because it requires to rewrite 
KDirWatch to support other protocols. 

Requirements:
- libhowl 0.9.6 . Unfortunately it crashes, patch was sent to author (also 
available in kdnssd/patches). He responded that new version of libhowl is 
going to be released in a week.
- Qt 3.3 - there is bug in QDns  TXT record handling - it was reported and 
will be fixed in next version. Patch is also available. Good news is that 
this bug in not too serious and it probably can be worked around.

	Thanks in advance for all comments,
		Jakub Stachowski
 
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