Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 
Porchdog Software: Howl.  This is the open-source implementation of Zeroconf that Shirky spotted.  It would be very interesting to see if this protocol is expressed in such a way that it can be a WAN overlay across NATs as well as working with direct wireless, IR, and port/modem connections among machines.  (I keep forgetting that my Nokia 9000's have IR connectors and run as modems, though it saved my butt in an Atlanta hotel whose phone system had gone out.)

I'm overloaded by the possibilities here, and I don't know that it means the Zeroconf protocol holds up.  I really want a trivial P2P bootstrap, and this looks like it may be the avenue.
posted by Dennis at 5/2/2004 11:54:15 AM