+1 for Avahi

After a bit of research I chose to use  DNS SRV records (and mDNS / 
Zeroconf nameservices). I moved to an non-distributed project before I 
implemented this though.

On 01/17/2013 08:13 AM, Benjamin Johnston wrote:
>> The idea of doing the ip address resolution on a DNS server sounds
>> elegant! It decouples the network issues and ros a bit.
>>
>> However, in such environments there is another nuisance that regularly
>> occurs: Some student's computer name may not be in the local DNS server
>> (or worse, not in all the /etc/hosts files). We've spent hours of
>> debugging just to find out that we had to set ROS_IP in those cases. At
>> least in the past, roswtf didn't point that out. After a year or so we
>> switched to dnsmasq - which publishes those hostnames on its dns server.
>> But not everybody has that running. It is an implicit assumption that
>> ros makes about the network infrastructure.
> I've not used it personally but would Avahi (i.e., Bonjour) solve this problem for you?
>
> I notice there is a zeroconf_avahi package for ROS but I would think that even if you only use Avahi for name resolution, then you'd have a fairly robust solution for communicating on any network with little setup, including those where you don't own the DNS infrastructure.
>
> (Ignoring the INADDR_ANY issue discussed earlier)
>
> -Ben
>
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