Re: Add Network Neighborhood to Nautilus

[Bruce Robert Pocock <brpocock 10east com>]

On Fri, 2002-07-26 at 11:21, John Palmieri wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, 2002-07-26 at 10:49, Bruce Robert Pocock wrote:
> > On Fri, 2002-07-26 at 10:09, John Palmieri wrote:
> > > Network would further be
> > > seperated into NFS, Appletalk, SMB etc. which would automagicly bring us
> > > to the correct browser.  
> > 
> > Ideally, these should all be handled together. Why should the user case
> > what kind of browser backends are installed?
> 
> Ideally yes but for now there is no browsers that can handle multiple
> protocols.  And what about ftp where the user can not browse for
> servers?  I would still like a folder in the network folder that
> contains all my FTP bookmarks and a link to a Wizard to set up new ones
> (like the add printer icon in windoz).
> 
> You also bring up another interesting issue.  For now most of the talk
> has been about file sharing protocols but any one computer, once they
> were discovered, could export multiple protocols.  Another question
> would be, "why do I care about protocols? I just want to know what
> services are available and from where."  In this case a list of all
> computers that export service I can use, be it file, print, fax, or
> others, should be listed in a browser.  Clicking on them would report
> the services available for that computer.  If I just wanted file servers
> I would be able to filter for that.  This would be sort of like a
> virtual LDAP server.  This is what I would like to see - the ability to
> drop a GNOME desktop into a network and with zero configuration I can
> see all services available to me.  Extreme wishlist :-)
> 
> For now it is simple to add links to at least alert users that such
> options do exist. 

There's really two major cases as I see it:

(1) No directory service available; user must manually supply URL

This infrastructure's mostly there already, yes? -- aside from various
tug-o-war's in the "favorites"/"bookmarks" arena.

(2) Directory/discovery protocol can identify servers

These are things like LANMAN/Samba/NMB, NBP (AppleTalk Name Binding
Protocol), and the various standards efforts like LDAP, NIS, DNS WKS
records, and SLP.

There's nothing (except a lot of coding :-) ) preventing gnome-vfs from
mixing some/many of these protocols. Ideally, the browsers would each
launch in their own thread, and attempt to identify resources available.
Matching up the computer providing various resources isn't amazingly
difficult - most of the time, the IP address is available (TCP/IP,
UDP/IP, DDP/IP) to "prove" it to us. (Masqueraded remote hosts will of
course show up as a single host, but that's not a problem.) The only
exceptions I can think of off the top of my head are non-IP protocols
like Bluetooth, IRDA, or IPX/SPX, so potentially e.g. two Powerbooks
with IRDA, Bluetooth, and 802.11 networking all turned on might each
show up twice in the other's browser, since we'd see three unique MAC
addresses for each.

mcDNS (multicast DNS) and SLP (Service Location Protocol) are the IETF
zeroconf mechanisms for advertising services locally, so that one
needn't e.g. configure LDAP. "See also" http://www.ZeroConf.Org/ and
http://ZeroConf.SourceForge.Net/ for more on IETF "ZeroConf" / Apple
"Rendez-vous (TM)" protocols...


Implementation details... either gnome-vfs needs a plug-in architecture
for combining multiple directory services (sounds painful), or Nautilus
could use e.g. "VFolders" to combine the various gnome-vfs-level
browsers; essentially e.g.

nethood: = VFolder ( smb: & nbp: & slp: & ... & bookmarks: )

...?