In the service of Aunt Tillie -- Zero-configuration networking

[Gary Peck]

On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 10:42:22AM -0800, Prasanth Kumar wrote:
> I think one of the problems is that there are hardly any devices that
> support Zeroconf presently that there is not much demand for its
> implementation on Linux or pretty much any PC. Most of the peripherals
> used by a home user are USB or Firewire based. Perhaps wireless devices
> might have some use for Zeroconf but most wireless hubs act as DHCP/NAT
> anyway.

I think you've missed the point here. Auto-assigning of IP addresses
(what your typical wireless hub with DHCP/NAT will do) is only one part
of zeroconf. The other, more important IMO, part is auto-discovery of
resources. With zeroconf, you can plug computers, printers, etc. into
the network and they'll all see each other. An earlier thread mentioned
that some printer manufacturers are already including this
functionality. Macs also use this for finding shared folders on the LAN
(similar to browsing the Windows Network on PCs/Samba). It's also used
for iTunes playlist sharing (pretty impressive when you see it "just
work"). I'm sure other people have more examples of zeroconf's
usefulness.

gary