aneth

A quick and dirty utility that uses Zeroconf to advertize its host machine with a specified hostname on the network. It can also listen for these advertisements and manage /etc/hosts accordingly, so that machines are automatically accessible by their provided hostname from any member running that script.

Usage

$ aneth start <hostname> [-s|--service <serviceName>] [-w|--watch] [-p|--port port] [-A|--aliases aliases]

• You can provide a serviceName parameter that will be used to listen for advertisements. Otherwise, aneth-hosts will be used.

• The --watch options tells Aneth to watch for advertised hosts on the network and modify /etc/hosts accordingly (you'll need to execute that with sudo for it to work).

• The --port options is for specifying the port number to use to advertise the current machine.

• The --aliases options is set of local hostname aliases in the form of

    --aliases from.some.domain:to.other.domain,another.one:to.another.one
  

$ aneth install <hostname> [--service <serviceName>] [--watch]

This will install Aneth so it is started on each system reboots, with the provided configurations. Currently, only Mac OS X is supported, simply using a launchd.plist(5). I know it should work pretty easily on Linux too, but I'm no expert enough to provide a proper, portable solution. Currently, I'm simply creating a dead-simple runit setup. I'm kinda lazy, I know. You are very welcome to fork and submit a patch that would include generating and installing a generic init script (or anything really).

Installation

You will need to install globally if you want the aneth executable accessible anywhere.

$ npm install -g aneth

On Mac, it will just work. On a linux machine, you need to install Avahi, a Bonjour compatibility library.

Enjoy.

License

http://wtfpl.org