[avahi] How to network deamon

[Marc Krochmal]

On Apr 26, 2006, at 10:13 AM, Lennart Poettering wrote:

> On Wed, 26.04.06 16:53, anton feldmann (anton.feldmann at uni- 
> bielefeld.de) wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>> my name is anton feldmann. I an student at university bielefeld  
>> germany.
>> I wold like to know if it is possible to use avahi to write a  
>> program,
>> which look in an local network for other computers and write the IP
>> addresses to a file, so the host list is automaticly updated?
>
> If the other computers don't run an mDNS responder, this won't work.
>
> If the other computers do run an mDNS responder but don't publish any
> services, this won't work either.
>
> If they run a responder and publish at least one service this might
> work. However, it still is terribly ugly, since you'd need to browse
> for all service types using an AvahiServiceTypeBrowser object which
> causes a lot of traffic and shouldn't be used by real world
> apps. There's a good reason why the mDNS/DNS-SD designers did not
> support browsing for host names in their specs. They wanted to stress
> that people should look for services and not for machines.
>
> Avahi and newer MacOSX versions register a service "_workstation._tcp"
> by default. You might have a chance to use that for your
> purposes. However, YMMV, and not all mDNS responders publish it, most
> notably Bonjour for Windows doesn't.

Also, future versions of Mac OS X will probably stop adverting the  
"_workstation._tcp" service by default, since this service is  
currently used by our Workgroup Manager application to configure  
machines that are bound to a directory server, however, by default  
most machines do not bind to a directory server so there's little  
reason to advertise this by default.

-Marc