[et-mgmt-tools] [PATCH] virt-manager: Use avahi to poll for local servers

[Cole Robinson]

Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 12:10:26PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 11:25:05AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>>> On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 11:28:18AM -0400, Cole Robinson wrote:
>>>> The attached patch adds support for avahi polling
>>>> to the virt-manager 'Open Connection' dialog.
>>>> libvirtd advertises itself via avahi so we get the
>>>> hard stuff for free :). To test this you will need
>>>> to make sure Multicast DNS (mDNS, port 5353 udp) is
>>>> open on your machine.
>>>>
>>>> I had a few more screenshots but fedorapeople isn't
>>>> responding. The basic flow is: 'Open Conn' defaults
>>>> to selecting a local connection, so the 'browse'
>>>> checkbox and list are inactive. If a remote conn
>>>> type is selected, the 'browse' checkbox and 
>>>> 'hostname' field become active, but we don't
>>>> immediately default to actually browsing the
>>>> network. Once the 'browse' checkbox is clicked the
>>>> list becomes active and starts asynchronously
>>>> populating. When an entry in the list is selected
>>>> its hostname (or IP address if the hostname wasn't
>>>> resolved) is placed in the "hostname" field.
>> I think there needs to be some uniqueness filtering because its adding the
>> same entry multiple times !
>>
>> The 'Browse hosts' checkbox is overkill - just always have it enabled.
>> There's no need to provide a way to disable it, since they can already
>> type in a hostname manually if desired.
>>
>> When presenting a browse list, the avahi recommendation is to present the
>> service names
>>
>>   "Virtual Host t60wlan"
>>
>> and not show the IP address / hostname to the user.  Let the user pick a
>> service name, and then turn that into an IP address/hostname when we need
>> to connect.
> 
> This is an example of the listing I'm referring to
> 
> http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/avahify-your-app.html
> 
> Daniel

Right, it's just the 'name' data returned by the avahi polling.

Part of the issue using this though is that if the machine
doesn't have a useful hostname (ex. something like localhost)
you'll see entries like 'Virtual Host localhost #3'. We could
probably have a column for advertised name and column for IP
address and that would provide about as much identifying data
as we can manage.

I'll check out the other issues you raised (dupes, no avahi)

Thanks,
Cole