Open SLP Notes

A stable release of Open SLP was 1.2.1 in 2006. This page has my notes from getting this version working on a number of systems.

Interface Selection on Mac OS X

On Mac, slpd relies on reverse dns for the machine's hostname returning an IP (stupid I know but that's how it is). Without reverse DNS the startup log will look like this:

Sun Jun 19 16:59:45 2011
SLPD daemon started
****************************************
Command line = slpd
Using configuration file = /opt/local/etc/slp.conf
Using registration file = /opt/local/etc/slp.reg
Listening on loopback...
Multicast socket on 127.0.0.1 ready
Unicast socket on 127.0.0.1 ready
Agent Interfaces = 127.0.0.1
Agent URL = service:service-agent://127.0.0.1
Startup complete entering main run loop ...

If you don't have working reverse DNS for you domain, you can edit your /etc/hosts file. First get the full hostname & local address of the interface you want to use:

$ hostname 
simonn-macbookpro.local
$ ifconfig  en1 | grep "inet " | awk '{print $2}'
192.168.1.204

Then add a line like the following to /etc/hosts

192.168.1.204 simonn-macbookpro.local

Now SLP recognizes the interface correctly:

Sun Jun 19 17:03:42 2011
SLPD daemon started
****************************************
Command line = slpd
Using configuration file = /opt/local/etc/slp.conf
Using registration file = /opt/local/etc/slp.reg
Listening on loopback...
Listening on 192.168.1.204 ...
Multicast socket on 192.168.1.204 ready
Unicast socket on 192.168.1.204 ready
Agent Interfaces = 192.168.1.204
Agent URL = service:service-agent://192.168.1.204
Startup complete entering main run loop ...