New GNOME service ?

["Jens Ch. Restemeier" <jchrr post uni-bielefeld de>]

Hi !

I want to tell you about a little MacOS application I found recently.
It's
called "Hotline". (If another Mac user knows more about it, please
correct me.) It implements several services, but with it's own protocol:
chat, file transfer and messages.

There are three parts: a "server", a "client" and a "tracker", all three
are commercial.

Basically it works like this: You start the client, which allows to
select an
active server. The list of servers is updated automatically, depending
on the
servers currently working.

After connecting to a server (login/password or anonymous) you can
- browse/download files on the server
- contact other users connected to this server
  - private or public chat
- read news/post news
A nice feature of the client: file-downloads are queued, that means you
can select all the files you need, but have only one file downloading.
This
is nice for resuming aborted downloads, and have in case of a broken
connection only one broken file. And of course some drag'n'drop, which
may be interesting for girc/gtalk.


The server has additionally some menus to do user management, or to
disallow
connections. Finally the tracker keeps a list of active servers. (I
don't
know if the tracker scans for servers, or servers report to the
tracker...)

Okay, how does this differ from just installing ftp and irc demons ?
This system is very nice for users who want to run internet servers, but
can't be always connected to the internet, or get dynamic IP addresses.

I'd suggest to build something similar from existing clients, maybe with
some guile glue.

This would work like that:
We use the existing services: irc, ftp and news

We need two packages: "out-of-the-box" useable irc, ftp and news
clients,
and "out-of-the-box" useable irc, ftp and news servers. We already have
irc and news clients, and with MC we will get an ftp client. All of them
would need a unified configuration utility.

The same for the servers: It should be a matter of pressing one button
to
start and to end them. And there should be a "unified" user manager for
allowing connections. And they should be configured, to be useable from
a normal user account.

All of this would be a matter of configuration, because most of these
components are already present on a Unix system.

Now the final ingredient: The "Tracker". The client needs to know the
server's IP address/port, which may be dynamical. We need at least one
server, which is always available, for example gnome.org.

If a user starts his server, this server will announce it's presence to
this tracker. The tracker will check the identity of the server (PGP ?),
and update the list of active servers. The server is responsible to send
a ping once in a while, to show that it is still alive. If the user ends
the server, the server will announce it's death to the tracker.

If the user starts his clients, they will automatically request the list
of active servers from the tracker.

For a better explanation (maybe...) you should look at the Hotline
webpage (http://www.hotlinesw.com). There's some HTML documentation, and
the program documentation is in PDF.

                                Jens Ch. Restemeier