Browse your network

Have you developed a network service, used DNSSD:: PublicService to publish it with the zeroconf system, and then wondered why it didn’t show up in Konqueror with zeroconf:/ from the kdenetwork module?

I did. And found out that the zeroconf kioslave restricts itself to filesystem services and redirects to the listing of the services for convenient browsing of such filesystems. It also orders the listing by the service types in the first level, not the hosts. Which is nice for that, but not what I was looking for. I wanted to see all devices and the services in the domains I care for, like lan:/ might have done (if it ever had worked for me), I only know it from screenshots, like this one 🙂

So hands on, write your own, brave man. Followed that, so find the prototype code in playground as network-kioslave. It also includes a library which might develop into something general to be added to Solid. But let’s wait for that. There is a lot of stuff that needs to be done, integrating the different service lookup systems, finding a general model for all them, and much more. I have first-hand rumors that others are starting on support for UPnP, so I am looking forward for some cooperation where possible. If you are experienced with samba, please contact me, too.

See a lovely screenshot in the style of the season (isn’t it always this season?) for what already works. As backend KDNSSD is used, and then quite some guesswork happens to generate a device and service structure from the info available. But it’s a start:

Nothing much to see, the local network is pretty empty currently, just a lonely router and my computer… And the one on it offering KBattleShip is myself, so nothing to distract me 😉

Clicking on the services shows where I am currently stuck. A service item represents a service running on a host at some port (or even ports?). But what to do on this service? E.g. the ssh service could be used to open a ssh-session in Konsole. Or be used for browsing with the “fish:/” kioslave. A database service could be either queried or configured. So just doing a redirect to another protocol is not what I want here. Instead there should be some new mimetypes one could register clients/handlers for. So in the context menu you could choose another option than the default one. Would also be nice for metadata display. I already install some new mimetypes for network services/devices, but the naming pattern might need some discussion. And xdg spec support. Much to be done…