[gnome-network]Desktop/file sharing and a case for SLP

["Miguel A. Arévalo" <marevalo marevalo net>]

Hi all,

first of all sorry for jumping in abruptbly and for my awfull spanglish.

I've been researching a little bit about network services on Linux with 
the UserLinux people, and came to the conclusion that Linux (or any 
other Free OS) needs a proper core services layer, you can see my rants 
here:

http://cgi.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Proposals/CoreServices

two things pointed me to this list, KDE Desktop Sharing packages are the 
only (apart from CUPS) that are using now SLP, and a comment about file 
sharing on Rodrigo's blog.

I think that SLP is a very good tool for making a number of Linux 
services much more user (and corporate) friendly. SLP is the service 
location protocol in use by CUPS and AFAIK on latests Novell Netware NOS.

The use for desktop sharing is quite obvious and it has been implemented 
by the KDE's desktop sharing people (although I don't like their choices 
on the client UI side) and could be a good plus for the desktop-sharing 
module.

But it would be much more useful for the file-sharing module as I think 
that the design of it should be a little diferent as how it is been 
planned now.

I think user filesharing must be completely in user-space (as opposed on 
both kernel and/or admin space) and so Gnome should supply a user-space 
filesharing daemon (some minimalist one implementing WebDAV or Samba) 
implemented for example as a nautilus extension or a panel applet. And 
so we can anounce it whichever port/address it is using with SLP.

I think that making filesharing that way it will be much more secure 
that the Windows or traditional UNIX style of implementing 
user-file-sharing.

After that we can go for a service browsing module for nautilus and so on...

What do you think about it?

Regards,

Miguel A. Arévalo