Sunday, April 6, 2003

The Joys Of Networking

so i've been reading about zeroconf a lot lately, since it's the underlying technology for apple's rendezvous, which is damn cool.

yesterday, i downloaded a copy of mdnsd, and was so horrified at it's code that i started hacking on my own. it doesn't actually do anything yet, and in all likelyhood it will never get further than my laptop's hard drive before i get bored and move on, but there has been at least one positive thing that has come out of this random hacking binge.

it turns out that apr doesn't currently have any multicast support, and since i wanted to use apr for my new toy, i had to take a go at implementing some. i've got the beginnings of it up and running (just enough to join and leave a multicast group), and i just sent it off to the dev list to see if people are in favor of me continuing work on it, since there are several more things that will need to be done if i want real multicast support in apr.

in the process of adding this support, i've learned a bit about how multicast works (it provided a good excuse to go back and dig out unpv1e2), and i've dug into the apple open source rendezvous
implementation, which is way cooler than mdnsd. even so, i may still continue work on my implementation, just for educational purposes, and because it would be nice to have one that integrated nicely with apr.