Zeroconf in FC5?

[Paul A. Houle]

On Thu, 02 Jun 2005 19:36:33 -0700, Daryll Strauss  
<daryll.strauss at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Fedora ships with Howl which looks to be the framework for doing
> zeroconf. It seems that what's needed is integrating howl in to all the
> appropriate places.
>

	Although zeroconf looks like a good idea,  the bogus entries that it  
created in our network routing tables were one of many red herrings we  
faced when debugging bizzare networking problems that were caused by a  
race condition in the 2.4 kernel that came with RHEL 3.

	A mac feature that's really fascinated me is the way that you can boot a  
mac into a mode where it functions as a firewire target.

	I've got an old PC that's getting abused by my toddler that I've been  
thinking of turning into an iSCSI target:  I've been thinking of making a  
micro linux distribution,  probably fedora based,  that makes a machine  
into an iSCSI target.  One application would be a 'storage appliance' for  
a SOHO environment,  but another could be a specialized boot mode,  that  
maybe lives on a small partition,  that would let you boot a mainstream  
Linux system into a iSCSI target mode the same way a Mac can boot into  
firewire target mode -- there are concerns about security,  and it would  
take some work to make a client so that this is 'plug-and-play' with  
another Linux box,  but it would be a fun project and probably useful.   
Zeroconf would be a great way to make this happen.

	The storage appliance project faces the more serious problem that my home  
network (and many others) is heterogenous:  i'd really like a global  
filesystem that works with Linux,  MacOS and Windows,  never mind a  
planned Solaris 10/x86 test machine and a stack of 32-bit and 64-bit SPARC  
machines that I'm going to install whatever OS I can to run on them.  It's  
for that reason that iSCSI might wind up in the same dustbin as WAP and  
the fifth-generation computer...