Phil McKerracher wrote:
> Thanks for all your responses. Apologies for the delayed reply - this
> mailing list is a real pain to use (wouldn't a phpBB forum be
> easier?), and for some reason my first post hasn't showed up on
> http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/index.html
> (yet later ones have), which doesn't give me much confidence.
>
> As a couple of you pointed out, I can use PuTTy or the web interface
> to edit or restore my config files to the flash drive once I can get
> into the box. And once I can edit the config files, I can fix the IP
> address to anything I like. This still leaves the problem of guessing
> the IP address the first time, though.
Way back when, the default in AstLinux used to be router mode, which
would bring up two ethernet interfaces and run a DHCP server on the
second. This was nice because all you had to do was connect a machine
to the second interface, run DHCP, and you could login to the AstLinux
machine (to find out the other IP address, configure, etc).
Then, people convinced me to make the default PBX only mode... Which I
still think is a better default. However, clearly there needs to be a
way to discover the IP address.
This has come up in the past. The simplest way would be to write a
multicast/broadcast daemon to transmit to the eth0 network on a given
port or something, like a heartbeat. One could then use a client daemon
or packet sniffer to find out where the server is.
The other potential is to use something like upnp/rendezvous or
similar. This is obviously MUCH more complicated, but it could
integrate well with other systems, like default Mac OS X installs.
> True, and I've now acquired one, but I still think it's a bit much to
> expect the average user to buy one, and setting up Hyperterm is a
> nightmare (especially since the required bit rate isn't documented
> anywhere that I could find!).
>
> I'm convinced that there is *no way* that a "real" product would ever
> be shipped with a fundamental limitation like this. All the routers,
> VoIP devices, modems etc. that I have ever used have had some way of
> either discovering the DHCP-assigned IP address (a display or voice
> prompt), or a way of configuring a fixed address (a configuration
> file, DIP switches, thumbwheels), or they just come with a fixed
> address that will usually work, like 192.168.0.100.
You are completely right. However, I'd like to point out that AstLinux
is not near 1.0, and some of these more polished "end-user" features
should be focused on after the core functionality of the "product".
I'm not saying that it isn't important, because obviously finding your
server on a network is critical. However, if it comes down to me
spending my time implementing this or fixing some pretty important bugs
or adding other new features, I think the latter should have precedence
at this point in time.
> Surely it should be fairly easy in this case to read the address from
> a config file that could be edited before first use somehow?
I'm pretty sure that I have mentioned this before, but the current DHCP
address for eth0 can be found in /tmp/mydhcpip. Obviously, there is
still a "chicken and egg" problem here...
So I ask the question - how should we "advertise" the existence of the
AstLinux system on the network? I still like rendezvous, check out this
article:
http://www.oreillynet.com/etel/blog/2003/05/advertising_rendezvous_service.html
Seems simple enough, right?
--
Kristian Kielhofner
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