[Bug 311258] Re: Few Zeroconf Service Types Work in Dolphin

[Robin Perkins]

Hopefully I can explain things a little bit. First off the
/etc/avahi/services file is what is used by the Avahi daemon to
*advertise* what services you have available on your local host. It is
not the recommended way to advertise services, the recommended way is to
have zeroconf support build into the service itself - eg have Apache
talk to Avahi directly to say what web servers it has available rather
than have a /etc/avahi/services/http.service file; this way additions,
edits and removal of services (http in this case) can be thrown out to
the network immediately. As far as I remember you need manually tell
Avahi to parse its services files to pick up changes.

Unfortunately for us opensshd doesn't support zeroconf/avahi yet (Is
there a wishlist bug for this yet ? ) and so we have to resort to using
a services file.

In KDE 4.3's Dolphin's Network folder we see three zones
1) "Network" which is a kio_network kpart; this is an experimental kio that will conglomerate multiple methods to provide information on what is out there on the network (I think something similar to what Vista/Win 7 does). At the moment it only uses zeroconf but will use others such as UPnP in the future. It shows up many services, more than the zeroconf kioslave does, however a lot of these KDE doesn't know what to do with them yet. For example it shows Apple File Protocol shares [_afpovertcp._tcp] (as used on OS X and by netatalk) however there isn't an afp kioslave yet. Another example is [_presence._tcp] which is an IM user - I'm not sure how this service information is going to be used/useful from a Dolphin point of view. (See http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdebase/runtime/kioslave/network/ioslave/mimetypes.cpp for all the services it looks for). 
2) "Network Services" which is a kio_zeroconf ioslave thing. (See http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdenetwork/kdnssd/ioslave/). The problem with this at the moment is that the services it browses for are fixed within the module (This may or may not be a bad thing depending on what the purpose of it is). At the moment these services are ftp, webdav, sftp, ssh and nfs. At a guess the intention was for this module to show not so much 'Network services' but 'Network file systems'. For example ssh is at the moment presented as a file system (fish) but it is just as appropriate to open a terminal with a ssh session to that service ( which is what kio_network does with it) . The two obvious services that are missing from that list are afp (but as I said above we will need to write a whole new kio for that) and the other one is smb, which is a bit of another story given:
3) "Samba Shares" which uses the smb kioslave. As far as I can tell this uses only the NetBIOS method for searching for SMB 1 services on the network. Nowadays however there are at few other ways to find samba/cifs shares: zeroconf and (I think) a new method in Vista (I'm not completely sure - I get a bit lost in Mircosoft's naming of network services and what exactly they are all meant to do...something about WINS servers or using Dynamic DNS servers or Active Directory ...and does PNRPv2 fit in somehow ?). Read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block in which case you will learn that also on the cards nowadays is SMB 2 which will no doubt have to mean some evolution for the smb kioslave. (Is there a wishlist bug for this yet ? )

So I think at the end of the day we need to sit down and work out what
these modules are going to do for us. (I would be interested in helping
if I could please). Is it more appropriate for us to 'browse' services
within Dolphin (for network file systems I would say yes) or would it be
more appropriate to browse them from where ever we use them, eg websites
[_http._tcp] should be presented within the 'Bookmarks' menu of
Konquerer, likewise should we be able to look for ssh sessions within
Terminal, IM users should be seen from within Kopete.

Anyhow, hopefully I have cleared some things up - if not feel free to
email me.

-- 
Few Zeroconf Service Types Work in Dolphin
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/311258
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