Connection setup: Scan for all available servers

[banshe...@googlemail.com]

Hi all,

I've seen in basically all of the examples that connections to a remote grpc server are setup by specifying its host/port configuration beforehand. We'd like to use grpc to remotely control software components on embedded systems (therefore device connections and configurations will often change) and ideally relieve the user of knowing the specific host/port configurations of each and every device he might be able to connect to from a specific location. I'm thinking of somehow scanning i.e. all available ports for grpc servers and provide an overview so that the user doesn't have to configure abstract host/port configs by hand. Can this somehow be realized?

[Carl Mastrangelo]

If all the devices are on the same machine, you can do some sort of rendezvous  by making a well known location that all servers register themselves with.  It would act as a registration for all local services.

If the devices are on the same network, you'll have to do something more complicated, like using an out of band networking library to broadcast to the local network to see whos up.  This is hard.

If they are on the internet, then going back to the registration  service and running a custom DNS server is possible.  Each server will tell the DNS server they are up, and then prospective clients can look up all servers.

Lastly, long term, Service Config (Configuration from TXT DNS records) will be added automatically.  You might be able to put the information in there.