All the really trendy network services these days broadcast their presence on the LAN using mDNS. In Linux world this means becoming an Avahi client and registering our services. virt-manager is also able to become an Avahi client and browser for services. So you'll be able to let the user just pick a host straight off a list instead of typing in hostname. The attached patch does two things: - Extends our event loop implementation so it can modify the event mask associated with an FD, and the timeout associated with a timer. While you could simulate this with an add & remove, this has the possibility of failure (from malloc). Merely updating an existing event can be done without failure. Avahi needs this ability for its event loop integration - Added qemu/mdns.c file to actually provide the service information. This has two parts. The first section of code is taken straight from one of the Avahi example programs. The second section is a implementaiton of the Avahi event loop contract in terms of our event API - it works very nicely which says good things about design of our event loop Some things... - I arbitrarily picked a service type of '_libvirtd._tcp'. The docs on picking service types seem non-existant on Avahi website, but it seems to be common to use service name from /etc/services and protocol both prefixed with _. - I advertise two subtypes, of '_xen.libvirtd._tcp' and '_qemu.libvirtd._tcp' What I actually want todo is to be able to probe the libvirt local drivers to auto-discover what virtualization platforms are available. A sort of lightweight virConnectOpen which merely returns TRUE/FALSE and doesn't actually allocate a virConnectPtr object. Need to extend the internal driver API for this. - I want to advertise whether the server is configured with TLS certs or not, so remote clients can automatically choose to use SSH urls with the remote driver if neccessary. - Let the admin turn advertisement on/off in the config file because some people may not like it on their LAN. If you fancy trying it, avahi-browse --all from another host on the LAN should show the service being advertised. The advertisements do not cross LAN routers by default. Dan. -- |=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston. +1 978 392 2496 -=| |=- Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ -=| |=- Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/ -=| |=- GnuPG: 7D3B9505 F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 -=|