D-Bus and Bonjour service discovery

[Padraig O'Briain]

I have not read your mail very carefully but I was wondering where 
avahi, http:/www.avahi.org, fits in.

Padraig

Tim Wilkinson wrote:
> So, firstly forgive any repeats if this has been discussed recently on 
> the mailing list - I did have  a bit of a trawl but nothing obvious 
> popped up.
>
> I was looking at what d-bus offered and I was wondering what the plans 
> are, if any, to extends the rather compelling concepts (and 
> simplicity) to small networks.  Specifically, as a generally happy 
> Apple user I've got very accustomed to the Bonjour service discover 
> concepts; the ease of using my scanner on one Mac from another, easy 
> sharing of photos or music, distributed compilation, etc etc etc.  
> Now, while I fully understand that Bonjour is supported in the 
> freedesktop domain, I can't help but feel it'd be terribly useful to 
> have a 'bonjour d-bus' - that is, the ability to use d-bus to connect 
> to services made available on a bus spanning multiple machines on the 
> same network.
>
> For example, I quite like the idea of running d-bus inside my 
> firewalls and routers since it would enable me to create services such 
> as port forwarding (I know, uPNP .. but I mean .. really) or 
> networking traffic monitoring, reporting and management (be quite 
> useful at work to have a sensible way to monitor changes in the DHCP 
> tables for example).
>
> Another thought would be to run d-bus on one of those new Linux phones 
> (the ones that are actually open so you can change stuff) so that you 
> could utilize the phone from your laptop over d-bus rather than be 
> constrained by a bunch of annoyingly limited bluetooth protocols (for 
> example, I'd rather like to use my cellphone as a speaker/microphone 
> connected to Skype on my laptop).
>
> I know - these are not the most compelling examples and there are 
> other solutions - but these solutions all seems to highly specific - a 
> bluetooth profile here, a random binary transport protocol there, etc. 
> etc.  While d-bus might not magically make it all happen, it provides 
> a unifying infrastructure to allow people build stuff that others can 
> consume - and my office and my house is no longer one machine doing it 
> all so I need that interconnectedness.
>
> Anyway, be interested in comments before I wander off and write this.
>
> Cheers
> Tim
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