Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-linuxmag.html
If you have access to the current issue (03/06) of the german
Linux Magazin make sure to read the two extensive articles about
Avahi (p.64 and p.90). Daniel S. Haischt wrote the second article, I
wrote the other. Both are a worthy read!
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/mod-dnssd-debian.html
Due to the great work of Sebastien Estienne there are now Debian
packages of mod_dnssd
and mod_mime_xattr
available from my little Debian
package repository. They’ve been uploaded to Ubuntu as well, but
we are still looking for some Debian developer who would be willing to
upload them to Debian proper. Feel free to contact me if you are interested!
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/photos/pack-ice.html
It has been pretty cold in Hamburg the last days. There’s now a thick but holey ice cover on the Elbe river:
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/mod-mime-xattr.html
I updated my little Apache module mod_mime_xattr to be compatible with Apache 2.0.
What is it useful for? Linux (2.4 with patch, 2.6 out-of-the-box) has been supporting extended attributes for files (EAs) for ages, but very few applications use them. To change that I wrote a small module for Apache which interpretes the EA user.mime_type and uses its value as MIME type for all files served by Apache. The EA has been standardized by the XDG MIME system, but apparently neither Gnome nor KDE support it right now.
Usage of mod_mime_xattr is simple. To enable interpretation of the EA on the entire tree use something like this in your Apache configuration file:
<Directory /> XAttrMimeType On </Directory>
That’s all that is required to make use of user.mime_type on all files where it is set. To set the EA use a command like this one:
setfattr -n "user.mime_type" -v "text/html" foo.txt
And foo.txt will become a file with the MIME type of text/html, although its suffix is .txt!
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/mod_dnssd.html
The first release of mod_dnssd is now available. It adds DNS-SD based Zeroconf support to Apache 2.0 using Avahi.
This work has been inspired by Sander Temme’s and Sebastien Estienne’s mod_zeroconf module, but supersedes it in every way. MacOSX ships with mod_rendezvous/mod_bonjour, but mod_dnssd is much more powerful than this piece of software as well. In short: mod_dnssd is definitely the greatest way to add Zeroconf support to Apache available today.
A few examples just to show how great mod_dnssd is:
DNSSDEnable On
This is everything you need to enable DNS-SD support in Apache after loading the module. It will publish all virtual hosts and all existing mod_userdir directories (i.e. ~/public_html) as services of type _http._tcp.
In case you want to publish some subdirectory of the web server as service, just place DNSSDServiceName inside a <Location> section for that path:
<Location /foobar> DNSSDServiceName "A special service called foobar" </Location>
You can even use it to publish WebDAV shares using Apache’s mod_dav module:
<Location /webdav> Dav On DNSSDServiceName "A WebDAV folder" DNSSDServiceTypes _webdav._tcp </Location>
This especially cool since we now have a free software server counterpart for Gnome’s and KDE’s WebDAV client functionality.
Or to publish your blog as RSS service:
<Location /blog.cgi?rss> DNSSDServiceName "The blog" DNSSDServiceTypes _rss._tcp </Location>
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-0.6.3.html
A few days ago we relased Avahi 0.6.3. This is an important bugfix release, everyone should update as soon as possible.
Avahi now has its own domain avahi.org and finally has a logo, thanks to the great work of Mathieu Drouet:
Avahi has moved from Debian
Experimental to Unstable. Ubuntu moved
it from Universe to Main since it successfully passed their security
auditing. The Fedora
Core development distribution contains it too, as does SuSE‘s
and Gentoo‘s. But
where’s Mandriva? Apparently they are considering
it, for whatever it is worth. FreeBSD Ports has it
too. I guess this means that Avahi has now been accepted by all major
distributions. Hurrah!
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/photos/winter.html
Impressions of the winter in Val Thorens, Savoie, France and in Hamburg, Germany:
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/mandelbrot.html
It’s impressing how easy it is to draw fractals with Python. Using the ubercool Python Imaging Library and native complex number support in Python you can code an elaborate and easy to understand fractal generator in less than 50 lines of code:
#!/usr/bin/python
import Image, ImageDraw, math, colorsys
dimensions = (800, 800)
scale = 1.0/(dimensions[0]/3)
center = (2.2, 1.5) # Use this for Mandelbrot set
#center = (1.5, 1.5) # Use this for Julia set
iterate_max = 100
colors_max = 50
img = Image.new("RGB", dimensions)
d = ImageDraw.Draw(img)
# Calculate a tolerable palette
palette = [0] * colors_max
for i in xrange(colors_max):
f = 1-abs((float(i)/colors_max-1)**15)
r, g, b = colorsys.hsv_to_rgb(.66+f/3, 1-f/2, f)
palette[i] = (int(r*255), int(g*255), int(b*255))
# Calculate the mandelbrot sequence for the point c with start value z
def iterate_mandelbrot(c, z = 0):
for n in xrange(iterate_max + 1):
z = z*z +c
if abs(z) > 2:
return n
return None
# Draw our image
for y in xrange(dimensions[1]):
for x in xrange(dimensions[0]):
c = complex(x * scale - center[0], y * scale - center[1])
n = iterate_mandelbrot(c) # Use this for Mandelbrot set
#n = iterate_mandelbrot(complex(0.3, 0.6), c) # Use this for Julia set
if n is None:
v = 1
else:
v = n/100.0
d.point((x, y), fill = palette[int(v * (colors_max-1))])
del d
img.save("result.png")
Some example pictures:
.
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/nss-myhostname.html
I am doing a lot of embedded Linux work lately. The machines we use configure their hostname depending on some external configuration options. They boot from a CF card, which is mostly mounted read-only. Since the hostname changes often but we wanted to use sudo we had a problem: sudo requires the local host name to be resolvable using gethostbyname(). On Debian this is usually done by patching /etc/hosts correctly. Unfortunately that file resides on a read-only partition. Instead of hacking some ugly symlink based solution I decided to fix it the right way and wrote a tiny NSS module which does nothing more than mapping the hostname to the IP address 127.0.0.2 (and back). (That IP address is on the loopback device, but is not identical to localhost.)
Get nss-myhostname while it is hot!
BTW: This tool I wrote is pretty useful on embedded machines too, and certainly easier to use than setterm -dump 1 -file /dev/stdout | fold -w 80. And it does color too. And looping. And is much cooler anyway.
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-0.6.html
Avahi 0.6 is now officially released. Get it while it is hot!
In related news: I prepared a patch for distcc that adds Zeroconf support using Avahi.
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-0.6-pre.html
Unless we find any major bugs Avahi 0.6 will be released on friday. We ask everyone to do some testing for us:
There have been a bunch of API changes. However, the API is now frozen, so feel free to start porting your application to the new API now.
A rough overview about the many improvements in Avahi 0.6.
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/photos/hheurokai.html
The Eurokai in the Harbour of Hamburg in the early evening:
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-compat.html
A short while ago I checked in to SVN two API/ABI compatibility
modules which implement the HOWL and the Apple
Bonjour (dns_sd.h) DNS-SD/mDNS APIs on top of Avahi’s
native API. Effectively this means that you can run *all*
Zeroconf-enabled software that is available for free operating systems
seamlessly on top of Avahi. Or at least the software that uses the
limited subset of API functions we support. Missing functions will be
implemented on an on-demand basis. Gnome-VFS/Nautilus works
perfectly, as does Gobby, which are the only real-world applications
we tested until now.
The list of supported/unsupported functions is available from SVN for HOWL and for
dns-sd.h.
The compatibility layers are actually pretty interesting pieces of code: for
compatibility with the way HOWL/Bonjour integrates with event loops we had to
hook up the timeout and I/O watches D-BUS depends on to a single file
descriptor. This involves all kinds of ugly things like threading and
“creative” ways to use the event loop abstraction Avahi provides. Some might
call this “cracktastic”, but it actually works pretty well.
The compatibility layers are not intended to be long term solutions. For
every session object we create a background thread that polls for events and a
DBUS session object. This is an utter waste of resources, especially on
dns_sd.h where every basic operation uses a session object of its own.
In addition, our compatibility layers are incomplete. We do not offer the full
set of functions or the full semantics. Our compatibility is just good enough
to make most Zeroconf-aware programs work with Avahi right now.
We consider neither dns_sd.h nor the HOWL API a “well designed”
API and encourage people to port their programs to our more powerful native
API. To stress this the two modules will warn the user about their usage and
write a warning line to STDERR and syslog. Hopefully this will annoy
people sufficiently that Avahi adoption speeds up a little.
To our own surprise we actually support at least one API function more than each of the
reference implementations! From dns_sd.h we support
DNSServiceEnumerateDomains() which is actually unsupported by
Apple Bonjour on POSIX/Linux systems. The documented HOWL function
sw_ipv4_address_decompose() is actually a NOOP in the
reference implementation, but isn’t in our compatibility layer.
Since dns_sd.h is the only file licensed under a BSD license in the otherwise APSL-licensed
mDNSResponder distribution, we were able to copy it into our sources untouched.
Here’s a screenshot of
Nautilus and Gobby running on top of Avahi through the HOWL compatibility
layers.
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-wide-area.html
Yesterday in the late evening I commited “Wide Area” support to
Avahi SVN, i.e. “DNS-SD over Unicast DNS”. Only browsing, no
“Long-Lived Query” support and no publishing for now, but it is a
start.
To show off how cool this is, here is a “screenshot” of
avahi-browse showing all services defined in the domain
0pointer.de:
$ avahi-browse -a -d 0pointer.de
Browsing domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1 ...
Browsing for services of type '_http-rss091._tcp' (Web Syndication RSS 0.91) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1 ...
Browsing for services of type '_http-rss20._tcp' (Web Syndication RSS 2.0) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1 ...
Browsing for services of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1 ...
Found service 'Lennart's Blog' of type '_http-rss091._tcp' (Web Syndication RSS 0.91) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1.
Found service 'Lennart's Blog' of type '_http-rss20._tcp' (Web Syndication RSS 2.0) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1.
Found service 'Lennart's Homepage' of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1.
Found service 'Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD' of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1.
Found service 'Lennart's Photos' of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1.
Found service 'Lennart's Blog' of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1.
Service data for service 'Lennart's Blog' of type '_http-rss091._tcp' (Web Syndication RSS 0.91) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1:
Host 0pointer.de (217.160.223.3), port 80, TXT data: ['path=/blog/index.rss']
Service data for service 'Lennart's Blog' of type '_http-rss20._tcp' (Web Syndication RSS 2.0) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1:
Host 0pointer.de (217.160.223.3), port 80, TXT data: ['path=/blog/index.rss2']
Service data for service 'Lennart's Homepage' of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1:
Host 0pointer.de (217.160.223.3), port 80, TXT data: ['path=/lennart/']
Service data for service 'Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD' of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1:
Host freedesktop.org (131.252.208.82), port 80, TXT data: ['path=/Software/Avahi']
Service data for service 'Lennart's Photos' of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1:
Host 0pointer.de (217.160.223.3), port 80, TXT data: ['path=/photos/']
Service data for service 'Lennart's Blog' of type '_http._tcp' (Web Site) in domain '0pointer.de' on any.-1:
Host 0pointer.de (217.160.223.3), port 80, TXT data: ['path=/blog']
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/tchibo-linux.html
I finally found the time to write up my experiences running Linux on my new shiny laptop. Read it here.
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-kde.html
Jakub Stachowski completed support for using Avahi as backend for KDE’s KDNSSD subsystem. This means that you can use any Zeroconf-enabled KDE application (including Konqueror) with Avahi as mDNS stack. You can find more information in the KDNSSD Wiki.
The list of software supporting Avahi grows longer and longer. There are some patches for vino and GnomeMeeting floating around, Rhythmbox already merged DAAP support based on Avahi, KDE is now fully compatible with Avahi. Shall your project be the next in this list? To get started with Avahi, read the developer’s documentation.
Oh, yes, we released Avahi 0.3 and 0.4 recently. Get it while it’s hot. No major changes, just bugfixes an Qt main loop support.
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-0.2-release.html
Yesterday we released Avahi 0.2. Get it while it is hot! Full announcement here.
In related news: Jakub Stachowski is working on a kdnssd-to-Avahi bridge. Soon KDE applications will be able to make use of Avahi without even knowing.
Sebastien’s Zeroconf Gnome Applet now has an SVN repository: svn checkout svn://svn.0pointer.de/service-discovery-applet/trunk service-discovery-applet.
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-sebest.html
Sebastien successfully completed porting GnomeMeeting to Avahi. Therefore I declare him the first one to port a “real world” application to Avahi. Hurrah! Screenshot here.
Shortly after, Sebestien – not lazy – announced his new Zeroconf service browser applet based on Avahi. It contains a drop down menu with all Zeroconf services found on your LAN. If you select a menu item the applet will execute the application that has been defined as Gnome URL handler for the specific protocol.
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/avahi-lwn.html
Seems today’s edition of LWN features a front page story about Avahi. It’s actually quite nice, even though I missed an emphasis on the fact that Avahi’s mDNS stack itself is embeddable into applications via a shared library.
I guess you’ll have to wait a week if you want to read the article without subscription.
Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/google-talk.html
I am on Google Talk now: poettering (at) googlemail.com
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