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

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Sat, 2004-01-24 at 19:05 +0100, "Miguel A. Arévalo" wrote:
> 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.
> 
doing this means re-inventing a new protocol/service, which we have
discussed for a long time about.

> 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...
> 
yes, the idea is to use service discovery. We are going to merge gmdns
(gmdns in GNOME CVS) into libgnetwork. We were going to do this, but
lack of time hasn't helped, so if you want to help, it would be great if
you tried integrating the sources in gmdns into libgnetwork.

Once everything's in libgnetwork, we just need to start adding that
functionality to all apps, like nautilus, epiphany, galeon, etc

cheers