[Klug-general] Dell to use Ubuntu on Linux PCs

[Karl Latimer]

On Thu, 2007-05-03 at 15:53 +0100, Shish wrote:
> > Erm zeroconf? Microsofts name for the protocol, sits exactly with the
> > apple bonjour and avahi specs.
> 
> Um, no. Zeroconf *is* the specs, and nothing to do with microsoft :P

Just to be anal, I think you'll find that apple were involved heavily in
developing zeroconf, IETF released the spec, and then apple renamed it
to bonjour in their implementation. Microsoft's implementation is still
called zeroconf,  they have retained this name, I expect to retain the
brand awareness created by the IETF.

> Apple's Bonjour and open source's Avahi are both zeroconf based (IPv4LL
> + mDNS + DNS-SD), whereas microsoft use IPv4LL, and then put UPnP and
> SSDP on top (their own similar, but incompatible equivalents to mDNS
> and DNS-SD -- just like I guessed :P)

So what you're describing isn't zeroconf then, which microsoft do use in
vista. Its UPnP, based, therefore it isn't intended to be zeroconf at
all. I think you'll find microsoft do include mDNS in vista. Maybe
they're just not using it for this. If you read the RFC for zeroconf
you'll see that the terms MUST are used accurately to describe the
defined requirements which enforce interoperability. 

So you guessed something skewed off which led you to a probable answer,
I suggested zeroconf as it is on the rise, I should probably have
figured that microsoft would use Upnp so xbox's show up in whatever
cracktastic network browser they have.

Lets just ignore the wikicrud... 

> So to the original point, what you're probably seeing is that the vista
> boxes are talking to eachother with UPnP and SSDP. I would guess that
> they don't show up in ping broadcasts because of firewalling

It is common for microsoft to use UPnP, and UPnP has little to do with
zeroconf networking, it is used in media centre extenders, xbox, routers
switches etc... Its not exactly a competing standard, nor is it quite an
incompatible but equivalent implementation. It is simply different. 

K,