Howl/Rendezvous/Zeroconf

[comokepa]

All this stuff about guessing IPs, entering port numbers, whatever… I thought it was a thing from the past.

Would be nice to see some zeroconf support for things such as ftp. Besides, if it was built in into the BIOS, I guess apps developers could take quite some profit from it without them having to implement it on their own in their single applications. More info on http://www.porchdogsoft.com/products/howl/

Still, what the heck do I know…

 

[1911Wolf]

What are you talking about man? This isn’t rocket science! There is no guesswork when it comes to the Xbox IP address. You either have your LAN set to DHCP or you set static internal IP’s. My LAN is static configuration throughout the entire structure, and it’s a cakewalk to know what your internal IP layout is. Port configuration? None, zero zilch! Port 21 is the standard port for FTP, you are reminded of this because several people, like myself, use non-standard port settings on our servers as an extra security measure. When you open FlashFXP to create the settings for connecting to the Xbox all you need to enter is the IP and user/pw settings, port 21 is already entered because it is the standard. And entering the IP should be simple, if you used DHCP it shows you that in the X3CL, or if you used static settings you entered then and already know it in memory.

 

[comokepa]

Hey, it was just a suggestion…

Zeroconf is useful to whatever protocol you want to use it on. FTP, music/video streaming, web server, whatever. You turn the server on, the client sees it with no user interaction at all. You can even use it on WANs even (although that does require some tweaking). Apple showed at a demo ages ago how an iTunes proto would list all the music hosted in a remote computer NEWLY added to the network, no configuration, no nothing. You buy a new computer, or your friend brings up a new portable, just plug the ethernet port, tick the "sharing" square on, and boom you see all his music. iTunes does that now.

Entering an IP is annoying? Heck, no. But you must do so in every app, every client you want to connect it to something. It'd be nice if apps just… saw servers, no question asked. That's what rendezvous is for.

Or that is what is marketed for. As I said, what the heck do I know.

For me X3 is good as it is. They're asking for feature requests? There they have one I can think of might be cool.