LAN Discovery

[sammacbeth]

In testing it seems that LAN Discovery is not currently working (I see no local network peers in the logs). If the discovery-channel implementation doesn't work, we could fall back to libdweb's ServiceDiscovery, at the cost of compatibility with the dat CLI and beaker.

[RangerMauve]

If there needs to be a change to how local peer discovery works, we might be able to get it into hyperswarm before it gets too widespread.

[RangerMauve]

So if there's a node module that behaves similarly to the ServiceDiscovery API, I don't think there'd be much pushback in using it in the rest of the stack. Worst case we can include it outside of hyperswarm in the SDK / etc.

[sammacbeth]

I looked into it a bit today:

Firstly, the multicast-dns module doesn't work with libdweb UDPSockets. The latter throws an error when listening to 0.0.0.0:5353. This means that no MDNS messages can be received. I'm not sure if this is a bug somewhere, or a limitation of the API.

Secondly, ServiceDiscovery from libdweb currently seems to be broken on Nightly. I'll have to look into why that is if we want to try that out.

[sammacbeth]

It seems that LAN Discovery works correctly on Linux. There I was able to discover a dat-node peer on my network. However on Mac, Windows and Android I didn't see it.

[RangerMauve]

Dang. 🤔

[sammacbeth]

libdweb ServiceDiscovery is currently broken (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1461830), however there is a ticket to bring it back.

The simplest approach will be to get dat discovery compatible with this API (i.e. DNS-SD spec), then implementing it with ServiceDiscovery should be simple. I'm pushing to get hyperswarm/discovery to be DNS-SD compatible in order to achieve this.

[RangerMauve]

BTW, is the lan discovery working in the latest version?

[sammacbeth]

Last I checked it was working on some platforms but not others.