ZeroConf in Ubuntu Edgy

[Jan Moren]

mån 2006-07-03 klockan 20:19 -0400 skrev Patrick McFarland:
> On Monday 03 July 2006 18:32, Dan Kegel wrote:
> > On 7/3/06, Tobias Wolf <towolf at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > No, and no, respectively. The usability problem is that users have to
> > > > deal with firewalls at all. We address it by short-circuiting the
> > > > issue: because we don't ship open ports, our users don't have to worry
> > > > much about firewalling.
> > >
> > > And how many users still have zero open ports one year after installing
> > > Ubuntu?
> >
> > All the ones who didn't need to open ports, which is probably
> > most of them.
> >
> > You aren't seriously arguing to get rid of the no-open-ports policy,
> > are you?  That policy is the single most effective protection against
> > infection there is.
> > - Dan
> 
> Oh God no. I'm just saying doing this and having no way to properly manage 
> this is bad.

I've vaguely followed this thread, but it seems to me there's two
different use cases for zeroconf, only one of which really is about open
ports. 

I want it in Ubuntu; I want it really badly. But not to publish anything
out to others, but for the simple function of finding and using other
devices on the local network. Listening, not doing, in other words.

We have right now a printer at home attached to the local network. It
gets its adress via DHCP from a router in the building, and naturally it
gets a different adress each time. On the Mac therre is no problem at
all; it discovers the printer whatever it happens to be called today and
lets my gf use it completely transparently. I have yet to make this mess
work under Ubuntu. 

After two days of frustration (including accidentally killing my ability
to do ordinary DNS lookups at one point - that was fun), I have resorted
to use avahi to find out which IP adress the printer currently has, then
manually create a new printer in the printer configuration to print (no,
for some reason just editing the existing printer giving it the new IP
adress doesn't work). It sure saves on paper if nothing else.

So disregarding all worry about iTunes, just having this enabled as a
passive listenerand setup so that this kind of device detection setup
works would really, really improve the desktop.


-- 
Dr. Jan Morén (mr)              
Japan:  090-3622 8920           jan.moren at lucs.lu.se
Sweden: 031-360 7723            http://lucs.lu.se/people/jan.moren