[IIAB] Request for mDNS name resolution from Internet-in-a-Box project

[James Cameron]

Thanks.  I hit this yesterday.

We already have some mDNS support present for Sugar collaboration in a
network when a School Server is absent; we have the Avahi packages,
but as you rightly point out we don't have the name service switch
module for mDNS, and so a gethostbyname(3) doesn't look at that
namespace.

I have looked for but cannot see evidence of it being removed, it
seems it was simply not included.

Does mDNS for Internet-in-a-Box work for you in the face of the
enthusiastic suspend of our automatic power management feature?

What would prevent a network intruder, or a malicious user of OLPC OS,
from supplanting http://know.local ?

Installing nss-mdns as an RPM during XO customisation is practical if
you use the right customisation tools, which in order of complexity
are:

- unlock the laptops and use the xo-custom script in mktinycorexo,
  thanks to Jerry,

- unlock the laptops and make your own build, with the patch below,

- sign an xo-custom script with deployment keys.

Waiting for the next OLPC OS build is an option, but I don't know when
that will be.  I've raised ticket #12730 to track the enhancement request.


>From bc224068e4976fce2cbbc4de9378f4cb425027fe Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org>
Date: Thu, 1 Aug 2013 08:31:01 +1000
Subject: [PATCH] add mDNS support for host name resolution

---
 modules/base/kspkglist.10.core.inc | 3 +++
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)

diff --git a/modules/base/kspkglist.10.core.inc b/modules/base/kspkglist.10.core.inc
index 857157c..1ff5b4c 100644
--- a/modules/base/kspkglist.10.core.inc
+++ b/modules/base/kspkglist.10.core.inc
@@ -55,3 +55,6 @@ usb_modeswitch-data
 
 # provides firewall-offline-cmd, needed for kickstart
 firewalld
+
+# support mDNS name resolution for local network content repositories
+nss-mdns
-- 
1.8.1.2


-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/