On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 8:17 AM, Timothy Murphy gayleard@eircom.net wrote:
Isn't that more or less what I said above?
It's almost the opposite. mDNS does name->IP and let's people find other machines; DHCP does MAC->IP and let's a machine find _itself_.
Or, another way of looking at it. mDNS is a bit like ARP, but for names.
Somebody already said this but it isn't just host names, it is for services and the ports they run on.
OK, I should have said "a rival to ARP + dhcp". As I see it, dhcpd assigns IP addresses to the devices on a LAN, and arp then provides a method of accessing a device with a given IP address.
Incidentally, I don't really see why mDNS is needed on a LAN. If a program wants to know the IP address of a device with a given name, why can't it just look in /etc/hosts ?
Devices aren't really the point. Start a second copy of mediatomb somewhere. Change the port it runs on. Start 2 copies on the same server on different ports. Tell the ps3 to find them. Where is the ps3's /etc/host file? How would you edit it - and if you could, how would you describe 2 of the same service on the same device? If I turn on a sony laptop running windows7, the ps3 sees both the windows media server and the sony vaio instance of the similar service.
I see that it might be useful in a much simpler setup, where there is no server; but if there is a server available, I don't really see the point of it.
A visitor with a laptop uses your wifi and would like to print something. With apple's bonjour (which can be installed on windows too, and avahi probably matches) he'll see a list of available printers without having to configure anything. Isn't that nicer than having to match IP/name/protocol/port up yourself all with different configuration concepts?