Hi Darren,
On Wed, 17 Jan 2007, Darren Kenny wrote:
We don't currently support Bonjour / Avahi, but there is a project
under way to change this - from the network side the Bonjour project
is being ARCed (or close to, can't remember exact status off hand)
Ah, oops. Being worked on anyway.
From then, it would be a matter for getting things changed in the desktop
applications:
- GNOME - this is probably the easiest since they have already bought
into the idea of service discovery with apps like Ekiga, etc capable
of discovering others on the network.
- Firefox / Thunderbird - could be slightly more difficult, since any solution
needs to be fixed in
the community code, we cannot maintain patches internally if we are to use the
Firefox/Thunderbird
names (it's rules of the trademark) - but on the up side of this, we do have
quite a good working
relationship with the community.
Slight tangent, but this really highlights why it sucks so badly to go
with non-GNOME apps, particularly for such important tasks. There's no
decent GNOME MUA, so the choice of Thunderbird can be excused on
pragmatic grounds, but I really do not understand why we ship Firefox as
the default browser: it really ought be Epiphany.
This kind of thing really sucks for users (other than the ultra-geeky
ones who can easily set a preference). It's just awful for useability.
As for auto discovery of web proxies, there is a mechanism that many
people use today, and AFAIK this is what Mozilla based apps use too,
is to locate a PAC file using the mechanism described at:
http://www.web-cache.com/Writings/Internet-Drafts/draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01.txt
There is also more at:
http://wiki.squid-cache.org/SquidFaq/ConfiguringBrowsers
Interesting.
Presumably that never actually made it to standards track? DNS-SD seems
to be the modern, more generalised approach: publish some kind of
_webcache._tcp record in DNS-SD (possibly with a URI to a PAC file as
TXT)
That's not registered on dns-sd.org, but it seems obvious - the value
easily to retrieve via Avahi and any further GNOME integration.
While GNOME doesn't support this mechanism, it does handle PAC files,
so I'm sure, if we were to push out a fix for the WPAD mechanism it
would be acceptable.
Probably better to add real DNS-SD support for webcache and PAC
discovery to Mozilla and GNOME, register the use with dns-sd.org. Then
go back and add WPAD to GNOME for backwards compatibility.
WPAD seems a dead-end to me. Be better to focus first on Rendezvous..
regards,
--
Paul Jakma,
Network Approachability, KISS. Sun Microsystems, Dublin, Ireland.
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/quagga tel: EMEA x19190 / +353 1 819 9190
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