avahi

eBrainPool 0.3.0 release with Avahi discovery - a Happy New Year ahead :)

Submitted by jeetu on

Well guys thought I'd put up a quick note.

Thought I'd close this year with a 0.3.0 release of eBrainPool. Code now put up on git.

This release is quite a milestone since it follows what the community has been advising us and moves away from the olsrd binding we had for discovery via our custom olsr plugin. Therefore, discovery is handled by Avahi now and eBrainPool works with any network which works with Avahi/mDNS.

This also means we can have any underlying mesh networking routing protocol in the network layer - olsr, babel, batman etc, apart from a standard local network of course.

A point to note for developers is that Avahi needs a service type registered with IANA so that a client can publish that service and other Avahi browsers can listen for that service. The ebrainpool service has not yet been registered with IANA and using an existing service such as presence or http etc would cause confusion with other bonafide clients on the network listening for these services such as Pidgin, Jabber, Printers,etc. Therefore for now a static service needs to be created in Avahi by placing the ebrainpool.services file in the root of the code in a location such as /etc/avahi/services. This means that avahi will constantly show an ebrainpool service as available - not desireable but once we have the parameters (such as what TXT variables we need) more clearly defined we can go ahead with registering the service

For now both the publishing and browsing code has been put in but the publishing code has been disabled and we're relying on the ebrainpool.services file to statically publish the service within avahi.

Well that's it for this year. Happy New Year to all and a super big thank you to all the community members who have been so helpful and forthright with us. We couldn't have got here without you guys :)

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What we learnt at Camp - Part 2 Discovery Services

Submitted by jeetu on

 

Discovery Services and breaking dependence from the Olsr plugin

Currently the eBrainPool client uses the Olsr routing messages itself for discovery. Our custom Olsr plugin sends out custom messages that signify the presence of an eBrainPool client on that node. This plugin also scans incoming messages for these custom messages and reports to the client upon discovery of other nodes with the client running.

This is bad design as was pointed out by Mitar earlier and reiterated by others at the workshop. This makes our application unnecessarily dependent on Olsr and also probably puts an extra load in the routing messages being sent out. Ideally discovery should be an independent function and our application should be able to work on any underlying network.

A few options were suggested :

- Zeroconf/Bonjour/Avahi
- Multicast DNS (mDNS)
- Distributed Hash Tables (DHT)
- Telehash

While Zeroconf/Bonjour/Avahi/mDNS work well for smaller and local networks. Distributed Hash Tables have proven successful over the Internet. Telehash works with a routing system based on the Kademlia DHT.

Ideally we need a technology that works well across networks of all sizes and scales from a local network to the Internet. I have to say that I can't wait to start work on this :)

Special thanks to Mitar,Saverio,Pau,Gioacchino,Bruno and Magnus amongst others at the camp for the above suggestions :)

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