Aloha,
I'm only a casual user of AREDN, so please forgive me if I misunderstand some fundamentals here.
I've recently been implementing DNS service discovery (DNS-SD) for zero config in an iOS application. A client can simply discover services running on the .local domain and connect to resources it wants. It's magical!
This made me think about the service advertising feature in AREDN. I'm not sure what happens under the hood when you advertise a service other than it shows up on the AREDN node web page and you configure some NAT.
Could the advertising config be combined with advertising service via DNS-SD as well?
For example, there are quite a few Winlink Post Office being advertised. With DNS-SD support, we could have Winlink clients search for those in the .mesh domain and propose a list of Post Office to use for a given session. Zero conf from the user is required.
I was thinking about having the Winlink application do the DNS-SD publishing but perhaps it's better if it could be done in AREDN router since the user actively publish the service and deal with NAT config there anyway.
Does this make sense?
Georges WH6AZ
Note: There is no current DNS-SD service definition for Winlink that I know of, so of course this would need to be defined.
winlink express will already discover them
https://winlink.org/content/configuring_winlink_use_ham_radio_mesh_network
I'm working on an iOS Winlink client, and I want to add this functionality. It looks like its pulling from http://localnode.local.mesh/cgi-bin/sysinfo.json?services=1
Is that the best source for service discovery and guaranteed to be supported in the future?
It's better to use the api, as that will be basis for the new user interface moving forward.
http://localnode.local.mesh:8080/cgi-bin/api?mesh=services