Re: Gnome VFS - plans for Gnome 2.8

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 13:07, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 12:51 -0500, Sean Middleditch wrote:

> > I might be biased, but I think working towards Zeroconf is a much better
> > use of time.  It has much broader range of support on UNIX systems
> > (mostly thanks to pushing by Apple and their Open Source
> > implementation), and it doesn't have the uber-annoying poor security
> > considerations of UPnP.  (UPnP, for example, offers a way for clients to
> > punch holes through your UPnP-enabled firewall automatically.  Can you
> > say Trojan?)
> > 
> I'd personally vote for SLP (www.openslp.org). It seems to fit much
> better in large networks and in multiuser systems.
> 
> Registration of services is really easy, either by config files
> (/etc/slp.reg and /etc/slp.d/) or by the API. It only needs a
> system-wide daemon, and, as some people say, it fits well in small
> networks and scales perfectly for large networks.

Yes, SLP is very nice as well, especially (as you say) for large
networks.  I'd still, as a user, like to have Zeroconf support in GNOME,
since Apple has pushed it rather heavily and has fully working Zeroconf
support in a number of consumer devices and applications.  Not as useful
for a corporation, but very nice for home users and lazy small-network
admins like me.  :)

I should also note that Zeroconf is quite capable of serving larger
networks as well, altho the Rendezvous implementation doesn't.  Zeroconf
is three standards; the service discovery part is based on two of them. 
Namely, DNS-SD can work independently of MDNS.  So you could add SVR and
TXT records to any DNS server and have clients query that server.  This
would allow tighter control over local service negotiation (no
link-local automagic stuff) plus you can use the discovery over the
Internet.  Using the existing DNS update standard, client machines can
also continue to register their own services on one (or many) DNS
servers in addition to link-local addressing, with the ability of the
administrator to control policy on the servers.  (I.e., limit the
services a machine is allowed to advertise based on its IP or DNS-update
username/passphrase.)  The "modular" nature of Zeroconf and how it
leverages existing technology and corporate infrastructure are very big
selling points for the technology.  Most people just don't realize how
flexible it is because Rendezvous only supports link-local service
discovery.  (Which will hopefully be fixed in OS X 10.4, if it's not
already in 10.3 - haven't checked...)

> 
> cheers
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.