[ros-users] Current best practice for multiple interfaces

[Benjamin Johnston]

> 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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