Re: File shareing by Ad-hoc

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2010-03-23 at 22:37 -0400, stone zhang wrote:
> Hi Dan,
> 
> As we know,  NWM support  shareing internet by ad-hoc, but now we need
> to support file shareing by ad-hoc for eReader(eBook). 
> If we have a ad-hoc network, one could transfer file to another(point
> to point or point to multi-point ).
> 
> We have some trouble, could you help me? Thanks.

Normally this is accomplished by service discovery protocols like Avahi
(called Bonjour by Apple) or UPNP.  NM is only the transport layer, and
when a shared network is started up you could certainly use that event
(either by D-Bus or via the dispatcher scripts -- see 'man
NetworkManager') to start the service discovery daemon.

> (1) How to host know  when one client connect / disconnect.

That's at the application level, not the the network level really.
Service discovery is how this normally happens.  Apple uses Bonjour
(Avahi) to detect AirPort APs and such on the local subnet on both
Windows and MacOS, and Microsoft uses UPNP to detect things like home
routers and such on Windows.  Apple also uses this for discovering the
remote management consoles of things like Xserves and SAN arrays.

Service discovery uses UDP multicast to announce the availability of a
particular service on a machine (file sharing, adhoc IM, etc).  Clients
listening for these announcements then can find out what services are
provided by what machines, and can get the "friendly name" of those
services for display to the user, or can just connect to that service
automatically.

> (2) One client , how to know other client .   arp could not fix this
> issue.
> 
> (3) We must think of that  one client maybe is not use NWM to connect.
> (For example , the client OS maybe is Window X or Apple OS)

In that case, Avahi is probably your best option since Bonjour (which
Avahi is a free implementation of) is a cross-platform standard that's
available on all major operating systems.

Dan

> 
> If you have any suggestion, please let me know.
> 
> Thanks again.
> 
> -- 
> 我是Stone
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