SLP (Service Location Protocol)

[Loïc Minier]

Hi there,

I played with SLP 10+ years ago and thought it was pretty much dead, but it
seems it's still being used to advertize printers -- wow!

On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 4:59 PM, Till Kamppeter <till.kamppeter at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I want to let cups-browsed do this automatically, so that I can set up
> driver-less print queues for printers with known languages (PDF,
> PostScript, PCL, ...) but without polling the printer directly to not
> wake up the printer from power save mode.
>

I guess waking up the printer or not is going to be vendor specific,
depending on the implementation of the network/SLP stack on the printer.


> What I would like to know is:
>
> 1. How do I scan the network for SLP services without knowing service
> names and types and without knowing which hosts in the network provide
> services or are SLP directory agents?
>

There are specific queries to search services by service type or to search
for servers/agents. It used to be possible to list all services on a
network, but I think nowadays you have to list all servers and then list
all service types (findsrvtypes) and then all instances of this type
(findsrvs <type>).


> 2. In a typical SoHo network, are there SLP services or directory
> agents? Are the usual SoHo routers directory agents? Or do we need to
> make it part of the Ubuntu standard installation to run an SLP server
> daemon to be able to make use of SLP?
>

I dont think SLP is common in routers and I wouldn't think we'd want to
install more central agents/servers by default when we dont know the
general network topology. The trend seems to be for individual services to
advertise themselves over mDNS/Bonjour rather than anything centralized
and/or SLP.


> 3. How can I test my environment with command line tools?
>

slptool is your new friend!

Cheers,
-- 
Loïc Minier
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