On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 8:17 AM, Timothy Murphy <gayleard at 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? -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com