I forgot: the firmware version, too.
And the router IP address. That is interesting information as it allows us to check if the gateway is up and actually functioning. The receiving of these MNDP packets in fact is some indication of that.
Of course the number of gateways using MikroTik routers is low, but maybe when similar packets were sent by ampr-ripd there would be info from a lot of gateways.
I thought it might be useful to have some status overview and maybe version information. It can help answer basic questions like "how many of the registered gateways are actually operational".
Of course it has to be decided if it is worth the extra traffic and the trouble of writing the software.
About gathering service information: there is some demand for an overview of services available on AMPRnet. People have suggested installing a search engine, and it has been done in some places, but IMHO a search engine, while useful, is not really the answer. When you do not know what to search for, a search engine has to be very clever to give useful results for queries like "show me an interesting service to try today".
What I am looking for is more like a website that shows a table of services, one line per service and with a clickable link that expands one item into more detail, describing interesting services (not limited to websites!) on AMPRnet. Things that draw your attention and that you may want to try. The detail would include things like "how to get an account" (when relevant) etc.
It could be constructed in a similar way to the neighbor table maintained by MNDP, except it would not be UDP broadcasts but e.g. some HTTP POST. When you have a service that is available on AMPRnet, you would do an automated daily POST of a small file describing the service (would be easy to install as a cron job using curl or wget) to the server, and the webpage shows all services that have recently been (re-)posted.
The result would be similar to the Wiki page http://wiki.ampr.org/wiki/Services , but with the advantage that services that have become unavailable will disappear from the list automatically (assuming that the posting of the info is done from the system providing the service and stops at the same time).
The beauty of a network of course is that anyone can make this and put it online. It does not have to run on amprgw or other parts of the network infrastructure, it can just be an experiment running on a Raspberry Pi at someone's home. When we have something like that, it is easier to get people going after they have connected to the network, and keeping them interested in exploring new things on the network. Maybe suitable software already exists, otherwise it should be quite easy to do on a LAMP server or similar.
Rob