[avahi] Service type - using an existing one or registering our own? - pls advice

[Mattia Rossi]

Hi Jeetu,

As you say, because you're not a messaging service, you should not use 
presence.

 From http://www.dns-sd.org/ServiceTypes.html :

presence        Peer-to-peer messaging / Link-Local Messaging


So the right way to do that is to register your own Service Type with 
IANA. This also allows you to adapt the Service Type to your needs, like 
defining special TXT keys.

Try to create and implement your service type first, (don't know if it's 
enough for you to create one in /etc/avahi/services/ to use it in your 
software), and to find out how much you need to tweak it, and when you 
got it right, register it.

Mat

On 10/11/11 05:35, jeetu.golani at gmail.com wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> Thank you so much for the work you have put in towards Avahi - truly
> appreciate it :)
>
> A few of us have been working on our open source (GPL) project called
> eBrainPool (http://ebrain.in). eBrainPool aims at allowing software to
> be discovered and used from any device around you. The eBrainPool
> client allows users can discover software on other devices in the
> local area network or create an ad-hoc mesh network (we currently use
> Olsr) of devices and use software off each other. X Windows (via ssh X
> forwarding) allows for using software remotely and mitigating
> architectural differences between the devices. One of the design goals
> is also that a user should be able to use remote software from this
> resource pool of devices but still work with his local data (via
> fuse).
>
> Currently we are using the Olsr routing protocol to create a mesh and
> we have a custom olsr plugin that aids in discovery. This ties us too
> strongly to olsr though and as has been pointed out by many in the
> community that this is bad architecture. It would make much more sense
> to use Avahi for local network discovery and maybe DHT/Telehash etc
> for discovery over the Internet.
>
> I am very new to Avahi / Zeroconf and currently am a little uncertain
> as to which service type I should be using ideally. Should I be using
> one of the pre-registered service types - such as presence? or would
> it be better to have our own service type registered with IANA (not
> sure of the process or how difficult or easy it is or even if is
> possible and how long this takes) ?
>
> The problem as I see with using a service type such as presence is
> that other clients such as Jabber may not realize that our client is
> not a messaging client and that may possibly cause some weird
> behaviour in a network with jabber clients etc.
>
> I'd sincerely appreciate hearing from people more well versed in this
> than I am as to what is considered the correct approach here.
>
> Thank you so much for taking the time and sincerely appreciate the help.
>
> Bye for now
> Jeetu
> ebrain.in | Beehive Computing
> Discover and run software from any device around you - an open source
> (GPL) project
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