David, I like the idea. I remember commenting when the hsmm-mesh/hamnet firmware first implemented something like that, we needed that on the amprnet in order to find things on the network. Which will make it more useful. At the very least each gateway needs a dashboard or something. But you are right, it has to be low bandwidth, as we still have a lot of technological challenges when it comes to radio links and speed. Short of that you have to nmap the whole address space :-) Not that long ago I suggested a way to denote the radio link speeds connecting the gateways to the radio LAN's in the portal. Closest thing we have presently is an index webserver at: http://web.oe2xzr.at.ampr.org/ Overall the German Hamnet guys have some good things going Active hosts: http://hamnetdb.net/?m=host&as=0 We need to recruit people with good coding skills to help develop things. I'd be offering to help if I knew more in that department. ---- Quote ---- Back to the original "available services" part of this thread, I've been thinking about this as well. Maybe the group could consider a services advertisement protocol like ZeroConf (Avahi in Linux, Bonjour in OSX) with some modifications to minimize it's chattyness? Things like stations should not beacon what services they offer more than once an hour w/o being directly probed, etc. --David KI6ZHD