[avahi] breaking avahi through vpn

[Sebastien Estienne]

On 2/12/06, Lennart Poettering <lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 12.02.06 13:32, Sebastien Estienne (sebastien.estienne at gmail.com) wrote:
>
> > what about doing something like the relaying gateways that i suggested
> > to fill the need for zeroconf with vpn?
>
> > Would it work? they wouldn't forward the query, but exchange the
> > browsing list on a regular basis (or something equivalent)
> >
> > what are your opinions?
>
> I suppose you mean something similar to Samba's "remote browse sync"
> option?
>
exactly

> I don't think it is feasible to implement something like this for
> mDNS. In contrast to SMB servers mDNS responders never compile
> something like a complete browse list, hence there is nothing two
> servers could exchange.

the idea would be to periodically browse for all available service
(like service_type_browser , avahi-browse -a) and transfer the results
over unicast to the other deamon.

I agree that it may be a bit hackish though... and that uniscat dns-sd
(wide-area) is a better solution. We just loose the ease of setup as
wide-area needs a dns server and configuration on each clients
(unicast domain + key/shared secret for publishing), that's why it's
not really zeroconf as zero configuration.

As far as i know wide area is already widely used in miscrosoft active
directory.

>
> Avahi already does forwarding of mDNS traffic between multiple
> interfaces. If latency is good enough you may use that to bridge two
> networks.
>
> Unicast DNS is definitely preferable when it comes to high latency
> links. There's no point in trying to modify mDNS in a way that it is
> capable of coping with high latency. There is already unicast DNS which
> is perfectly capable to deal with situations like that.

the idea wasn't to modify mdns, but just implementing a separated deamon

this idea is not really new, some project already did things a bit like this:
- rendezvousproxy:
http://ileech.sourceforge.net/index.php?content=RendezvousProxy-News
- zerospan:
http://www.zerospan.org/

>
> Lennart
>
> --
> Lennart Poettering; lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
> ICQ# 11060553; GPG 0x1A015CC4; http://0pointer.net/lennart/
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--
Sebastien Estienne