[lime-dev] Intro and Discovering local services using mdns

Hi All, My name is Nicolás, I'm from Argentina and I'm working promoting community networks while I travel in Latin America... Glad to be part of this community, and thanks to you all for all you have been doing so far, it is amazing!!! I wanted to share with you some of my last work (that I've been discussing with Nico Echaniz, who suggested to migrate it to here), about how we can promote the use of local services. My view about this has been on using local discovery techniques to identify which local services are around using mdns, and then promote those services via a captive portal. There are many services that are already shared in this way (like printers, media repositories, chat apps) and it is quite easy to add new ones or index those that are not added manually also. I have also defined a strategy on how to deploy this on LiMe based on Nico`s experience on multicast packages (those used by the mDNS discovery mechanism) on mesh networks (quite a mess for now)... so I found a workaround for this specific case. We cound add a daemon to LiMe that permanently scans its local network searching for services, and shares that information via Alfred. Together with another daemon that listens to Alfred and adds that information to the LiMe mDNS Service (Avahi)... that sorts out the multicast issue and lets us share that valuable information efficiently. For those services that don't support mDNS we could add an interface on luci to manually administer them. Finally, we could add a section on the Captive Portal to show this information. What do you think? Regards, -- Nicolás Pace http://www.linkedin.com/in/nickar