Recovery of discovery

It's been a while, which let's me look at my last blog with perspective. I wish I could say that I have so much to say because I've been progressing so rapidly the last couple of weeks, but I can't. I got stuck for a couple of days, which ended up forcing me to think deeply about the problem and ways to solve it. Of course this isn't a bad thing. I ended up re-implementing my code to remove published services that hardly resembles the first solution. My last idea worked, but it was a bit of a hack. My new implementation uses avahi's built in "Item Remove" capabilities to announce a signal when a service is to be removed. Here's the catch, that signal only announces the name, stype, and domain, which is "HTTP Keyserver", "_geysign._tcp", and "local." Everyone that starts up Keysign will have the same strings for these variables, which begs the question as to how will avahi browser distinguish between remove signals from different users? There were two reasonable ways to address this issue. One would be to startup the server so that avahi publisher announces additional information that is uniquely identifiable to that computer. Unfortunately, the code require do this would have been ungainly and require repeating a lot of the same code already present. The second option was to add specific information to the name variable, which was what I ended up doing. As soon as Tobi gave me the okay, I was able to add this functionality to the code and viola, the program can now remove services when users either hit the back button or turn off the program. I experienced much joy upon seeing the appropriate service being removed from the list of discovered services in the logs.

However, as we know other situations could arise in which neither of those events occurred and someone's program ceased to publish services, such as a battery dying. Ideally, what would make sense is to have the browser continuously refresh its list of published services. It sounds simple enough and you would imagine that you could use Avahi in such a manner. After looking at several people's code in which they use Avahi discovery services and googling deep within the bowels of the internet, such a idea seems beyond the scope of Avahi. There's record of someone asking the same question and there are no responses to their question. Uh oh. However, I think Avahi is smarter than I previously thought it was. I thought the only way to remove services was by Avahi explicitly sending a remove signal. However, a few blurbs here and there have suggested that Avahi discovery services "know" when the signal is lost and initiates its own remove signal regardless if the program publishing services has completely and suddenly stopped running. I crudely tested it and even if I shut down the terminal that is running the publisher, my browser that is running in a separate terminal appears to still receive the remove signal. I just "discovered" this golden gem of knowledge about 20 minutes ago and I'm rejoicing that perhaps, yes perhaps, my fix is close to completion and will work as hoped!

I've also been working on a completely independent GUI to display the number of active users on the network, but I'll save that story for another time...