New subject: Is there raceroutre machine on 44 net available for public ?

8 Mar 2016

...
  3-rd option is interesting. Just that there will be
alot of opposition
 from people worrying about 1 ping an hour should some multicast group
 announcement and subscription messages appear on the network... 
No, it would work the other way around!
Someone sets up a service on amprnet where services can announce themselves
to be in the global directory of services.
Anyone running a service who would want to be in that directory sends regular
announcements to the central server, and those who do not want traffic simply
don't annouce themselves and won't have any unwanted traffic.

It can be really simple, any capable PHP or ASP programmer can write this in
"one rainy sunday afternoon" as the saying is here.  Of course to get it
universally accepted is another matter.

Design would be like this:

Anyone who wants to announce their service makes a cron job that once per day
posts a file to the central server (XML, JSON, whatever) using a simple call to
wget or curl.  The file contains the specification of the local services.
It can be called manually whenever the file has been edited for quick update.

The central server receives the posts (simple HTTP POST) and parses the data,
if valid it creates one or more database records with services and sets the
time it (last) received this announcement.

The same central server provides an overview page (with search and/or selection
options) that just dumps the contents of the database as a table.  There is
some expiration interval (a small multiple of the post interval, e.g. 3 days)
after which records are deleted or no longer shown.  This can also be a parameter
in the selection.

Bottleneck: convince everyone who provides some service on amprnet to write
the corresponding XML/JSON file and setting up the cron job.  Providing a working
script callable by cron (i.e. the wget call with the proper parameters) will
help.  An indication how to write a properly formatted file and/or a tool to do
this will also help.

It can be made a part of www.ampr.org, for example.  Then we can direct anyone
there to lookup the service directory.

Rob

Re: [44net] Is there raceroutre machine on 44 net available for public ?