Linux In the Family Room?

njcfm writes: "Ok, you've all heard and seen embedded Linux running in all sorts of useful devices; now with the backing of Intel it can run your home network too!" The story is about UPnP ^[?] for which Intel has released a Linux toolkit.

Comments

Re:Sounds like Jini

[drinkypoo]

As far as I can tell, the difference here is that UPnP is likely to go somewhere. :)

I think that Sun opened their mouth too soon on some of their favorite technology concepts, like having everything in your house speaking java and doing the Jini thing. They should have come up with a large number of prototype devices and a slick UI before ever saying anything; Microwave (This is the easiest, since controlling a microwave basically comes down to bringing ONE circuit high or not), toaster, oven (Preferrably with a camera in it so I can look at my roast), and so on.

Also, jumping on top of linux support is an excellent move. New JDKs have been slow to appear on linux, I can only assume that new implementations of Jini will be as well. Linux has made huge inroads into the embedded and realtime markets, and ignoring its value as the OS for appliances is too big a mistake to be forgiven. I know that Sun has their own OS to worry about, but they can't make Linux go away, and they had better learn to play well with others.

What about SLP

[Raven667]

SLP (Service Locator Protocol) seems to already be a good way to detect and locate services automatically on a network. It is a defined standard in RFC2608 and is used as the basis many networking technologies already (NetWare 5, MS W2K) and can be easily and consistantly configured to support any service type imaginable (it uses URI/URLs as its encoding system). There is already two SLP libraries for Linux, one from Sun under the SCSL and one from Caldera under the GPL.

Actually, in my limited research, this looks like a really neat way to generally advertise services. You would be able to create something like the Network Neighborhood or an NDS tree (Using SLP and LDAP together) for UNIX. Being able to plug into a network and instantly find out exactally what hosts have what services available without any configuration on your part (info for master DA server can be sent via DHCP) without all the messiness that the SMB browser protocol has (SMB, against all odds, is actually considered a protocol! Ha!) is a Really Good Feature(tm).