Advertise remote administration services of Mythbuntu boxen
Avahi makes it easy to discover remote boxes and the services running on them.
What we should do:
1) Let Mythbuntu boxen advertise their SSH and VNC services over avahi
1.1) For VNC: current releases of x11vnc have native support for avahi. We need to get this version into Ubuntu. If this poses a problem, we can still fall back to the avahi-publish binary.
1.2) For SSH: OpenSSH currently does not come with native support for avahi. We will have to use avahi-publish or an entry in /etc/avahi/
For both services, it'd be beneficial if they were only advertised when running, so using avahi-publish or native support would be preferable over static entries in /etc/avahi/
2.) Show those remote services in MCC
Adding a new plugin should work well for this. We probably want to filter out services running on localhost. A good UI might be a forest of flat trees where the root node is the name of the remote machine and the leaves represent the remote services. Clicking on a remote service would launch vncviewer or a shell running a ssh client respectively.
See avahi_discover.in [1] for example code.
It should be possible to open multiple sessions.
3) OPTIONAL:
* It might be nice to have only Mythbuntu boxen showing up instead of all machines running avahi, but I'm not sure of a clean way to do it. Adding a dummy service might work, but that sounds like a hack.
* Another possibility: add an option to run package upgrades etc on all boxes simultaneously (or just on a few selected ones), kind of what the clusterssh package can do.
Blueprint information
- Status:
- Not started
- Approver:
- None
- Priority:
- Undefined
- Drafter:
- None
- Direction:
- Needs approval
- Assignee:
- None
- Definition:
- New
- Series goal:
- None
- Implementation:
- Unknown
- Milestone target:
- None
- Started by
- Completed by
Related branches
Related bugs
Sprints
Whiteboard
Work Items
Dependency tree
* Blueprints in grey have been implemented.