Re: [dnssd] Setting device friendly names

[Stuart Cheshire <[e-mail]>]

On 21 Jul 2016, at 02:54, STARK, BARBARA H <[e-mail]> wrote:

> UPnP SSDP announcements include a friendly name in the SSDP header. To me, this is comparable to the instance name in DNS-SD / mDNS. And comparable to a NetBIOS name.

Yes. I don’t know any service discovery protocol that *doesn’t* have “friendly names”.

The question was about a ubiquitous protocol for *setting* the “friendly name” that’s universally supported on (virtually) all devices.

> When I ask my router for a list of hosts on the network, and when I ask my BluRay player to show me a list of content sources (UPnP), the lists use the same names for devices (because these devices use the same name across protocols).

If one computer shares two USB printers on the network, do both shared printers have to appear with the same name (the same as the name of the computer that’s sharing them)? Restricting services to one-instance-per-host is quite limiting.

<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6760#section-3.3> Address Services, Not Hardware

> Yes, there is also a UPnP Service defined that allows for remotely changing the friendly name. https://openconnectivity.org/upnp/specifications/friendlyinfoupdate1. But this service was only published in 2014 (long, long after the UPnP Device Architecture required "friendly name" in SSDP advertisements), it is not widely implemented (not mandatory to implement)

Do you personally own *any* device that supports this? I know the “standard” exists. My question was how many products actually implement it. The world is full of so-called “official standards” that no real-world products implement.

> FWIW, UPnP is an ISO/IEC standard.


Yes, a great example: OSI networking.

Stuart Cheshire