Flexible, Solid and Portable Service Discovery

Question

I am looking for a way for clients in a LAN to find all the instances of my server application without any configuration. Instead of hacking something myself, I'd like to use an existing solution. Personally, I need it to be done in Python, but I'd happy to hear about solutions in any other language.

So why am I not using avahi or OpenSLP or some other Zeroconf/SLP solution? Well, there are a couple of additional criteria, and I'm under the impression neither of the aforementioned systems matches them.

I'm looking for a solution that is:

• Flexible. It must not require superuser rights, i.e. only use ports>1024.
• Solid. It must allow multiple services of the same and different service type on a single machine and continue advertising the services even when the instance that started the advertisement server stops or crashes.
• Portable. It must run nearly everywhere, or at least on *BSD, Debian/gentoo/RedHat/SuSe Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows NT.
• Light. Ideally, one Python script would be the whole solution. I'm not in the least interested in address autoconfiguration or something like that, although I'd begrudgingly accept a solution that has lots of features I don't need. Furthermore, any one-time setup is a strict no-no.

I expect something like this:

def registerService(service): # (type, port)
    if listen(multicast, someport):
     if fork() == child:
      services = [service]
      for q in queriesToMe():
       if q == DISCOVERY:
        answer(filter(q.criteria, services))
       elif q == ADVERTISE and q.sender == "localhost":
        services.append(q.service)
    else:
     advertiseAt("localhost", service)

Answer 1

I assume you have control over the client apps, not just the server app, in which case Pyro might work well for you.

Flexible: uses non privileged ports.

Solid: It has been well maintained for many years.

Portable: pure Python and well tested on multiple platforms.

Light: I think Pyro is light for what you're getting. Maybe asking for one Python script is unrealistic for a network naming service?

Even if you don't want to actually use the "remote object" paradigm of Pyro, you still might be able to just use its naming service.

Answer 2

I wrote an application/library (currently Python and CLI interface) that matches all these critera. It's called minusconf. Turns out forking is not even necessary.