Working on howl port

[Andrea Campi]

Hi all,

just a quick note to let concerned parties know I have started
working on the howl port. As mentioned on the dingo page, the goal
is to have a fully working BSD-licensed implementation of zeroconf.

At the moment I have autoipd working for me and slightly tested; I
plan to do more tests during the next weeks. The next step will be
getting nifd to work (that should be quite easy) and verifying
everything together. I will probably start publishing and regularly
updating patches on my website shortly.
There are at least a couple of bugs I'd like to get fixed upstream
as they are in architecture-neutral parts and they should affect
other platforms as well.

I need help from people in the know, mainly in the shape of eyes
over my code. In particular, although it's hardly science fiction,
I am uncertain on whether I do things the canonical way or we have
better ways; a sort of best practices if you will.

One more point I'd like to get feedback on. The "canonical" way
to run autoipd, that is the way it recommends in documentation,
is to have it start when dhclient fails to grab an IP and let it
manage IP assignments on the interface (i.e., set the IP with
SIOCSIFADDR). I dislike this approach for several reasons, the
more relevant one being that since both dhclient and autoipd
keep running they might get into an ioctl war that's a sure way
to get no networking at all. :-/
The way I'm addressing this is to have autoipd use SIOCAIFADDR
and manage exactly one address in the 169.254/16 block. This
means you will ALWAYS have an IP address in that range; if you
also run dhclient, you might have an additional IP and a default
route.

Thoughts?

Bye,
	Andrea

-- 
            Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day;
     teach him to use the Net and he won't bother you for weeks.