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DeviceDiscovery accessor

The DeviceDiscovery accessor discovers IP addresses, plus names and MAC addresses when possible, of devices available on the local area network.

Currently, it uses a combination of the ping and arp commands to do so. Other service discovery mechanisms are possible for future extensions.

Implementations for Node.js and for Ptolemy are available.

• For Node, the accessor is located in the SwarmOS repository under /hosts/browser/public/accessor/DeviceDiscovery.xml
• For Ptolemy, in the Ptolemy repository, look to $PTII/org/terraswarm/accessor/jjs/demo/DeviceDiscovery/DeviceDiscovery.xml

The ping scan should discover all IP-connected devices regardless of which service discovery protocol (if any) they implement (e.g. upnp, bonjour, ...) For example, Hue bridges should be detected. Further discovery mechanisms will be needed for non-IP devices.

Issues

• Ptolemy model
  • The model pings 0-255, which is ok for class-C networks. We should accept the netmask or broadcast address, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1221517/how-to-get-subnet-mask-of-local-system-using-java
  • Will this work if a machine does not answer pings?
  • Some day, we should interface to nmap. There is a Java interface to nmap on sourceforge, though stackoverflow indicates that there are problems, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7795648/nmap-wrapper-for-java

See Also

• Victor Nouvellet. "The Discovery Project," April 5, 2017; Presented at the Ptolemy Group Lunch, University of California Berkeley.
• Obsolete notes about using the swarmos repo