[clug] How to connect two Linux boxes? [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Brad Hards]

On Friday 04 September 2009 13:34:49 Francis James Whittle wrote:
> > It is exactly for this situation "I have two machines on their own
> > network". Even Winders & OS/X have some version of it.
>
> I believe both Microsoft and Apple were party to the group that came up
> with it.
According to Stuart Cheshire (who wrote the internet drafts), Microsoft and 
Apple people came up with at the bar after an IETF meeting.

> > For extra credit, anyone want to explain how it works on either Ubuntu
> > or Redhat or any linux. Commandline or GUI.
The link-local part of zeroconf basically picks an address (out of most of 
169.254.0.0/16), you arp for the address, and if no-one answers, its yours. 
All you have to do is to defend (with arp) the address so no-one else claims 
it.

> The canonical (not Canonical Ltd.) way to do it on Linux is using the
> avahi suite <http://avahi.org/>.  The particular piece is is Link-Local
> version 4 addressing and is handled by avahi-autoipd;  This is designed
> to hook into ISC's dhcp-client and activate when it doesn't get an IP
> address from a DHCP client.
Unfortunately it is broken if you have more than one interface - there is no 
way to know which one to use to talk to an address in 169.254.0.0/16.

Brad