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.

What's the point?

If you're the kind of person that needs to manage multiple machines and VMs in a safe network, you might have come across the annoyance of referring to them on the network (getting their IP address and so on). Wouldn't it be nice if those machines just had simple names like a.dev.local, b.dev.local, c.dev.local and so on. Open a terminal, install Aneth, start it and BOOM, all the other machines will be able to refer to it using the name you want. No playing with DHCP, UNIX hostnames, DNS or what have you. It just works.

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