Re: Add Network Neighborhood to Nautilus

[Bruce Robert Pocock <brpocock 10east com>]

On Mon, 2002-07-29 at 09:54, Abe Fettig wrote:
> Since I don't think anyone else has mentioned it here yet, I will:
> 
> KDE has a cool program called LISa, that does most of the things people
> have been talking about here - discovering servers on your LAN, figuring
> out what protocols they support, etc.
> 
> http://lisa-home.sourceforge.net/main.html

*Disclaimer: this is based upon the manuals only, not actual experience*

While I'd agree that we should ideally co-operate with LISa servers to
create browse lists, it looks like LISa is primarily based upon
portscanning[1], and requires the user to set up IP ranges to be
scanned. This sort of activity seems (IMHO) to be exactly what broadcast
IP traffic was designed for, and it seems contrary to ask the user to
provide the IP address of a resource in order to find out if it
exists... 

Really, my main arguments against adopting LISa:

 * Portscanning is often considered a "hostile" activity... (but certain
efforts are made in LISa to avoid being "too rude")
 * User must pre-configure IP ranges to be portscanned
 * One more thing that has to be changed (either manually or via e.g. a
Location Manager) whenever moving the computer to another network, which
is especially annoying for laptops/handhelds/&c.

That said, LISa is up and running, and perhaps would be a good
starting-point to solve these problems? -- i.e. use LISa as a point of
departure?

NMB, NBP, CUPS (the print servers), and (to a certain extent) NIS
provide existing broadcast "browse" services[2]. SLP is perhaps the
"IETF best practices" way to do this (? anyone more knowledgeable about
such things...?) but we could "hijack" NBP "resource type" fields to
advertise arbitrary services as well, if desired; for example, if a user
cares to export FooControl services over ones LAN, a name like
"MyWorkstation:FooControl *" ("@*" means "local zone" in NBPspeak)...


[1] but does also use NMB broadcasts to ID LANMAN=SMB=WfW=Samba...
shares