[Mono-list] Zeroconf

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> I've to write an application which will be used on a network. The
> application will consist of a daemon which is listening on all the
> computers on the network and a Mono GUI application. The thing is that I
> need to have an easy way to detect all the computers which are running
> the daemon so I can send commands. There also will be a special computer
> which will be storing central information and I need to know its IP
> address too. The only solution to this which I could think of is using
> Zeroconf and publishing services on the network. The thing is that I
> couldn't find a C# wrapper for libhowl(the Zeroconf C library). So my
> options here are writing a wrapper around it(i don't even have an idea
> how to do this, only that I have to deal with P/Invoke) or using a
> native library. The only native implementation which I found is
> http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?mdnsresponder which seems
> dead and moreover doesn't have any docs. Do I have any other options for
> this except using Zeroconf? For the curious, I need this functionality
> for an open source management system for schools.

Depending on specifically what you want to do using DNS SRV records may
be appropriate and this is widely supported by most 'corporate' software
clients and becoming more so.  There is also SLP (Server Location
Protocol) which is used extensively by Novell (I think).  If you network
is anything like large I think these are certainly better solutions than
using straight ZeroConf (I think ZeroConf actually uses DNS SRV for some
things).