I'm trying to pair my ~/music repositories on my two laptops (Ubuntu 10.04 and 12.04) using the Linux standalone tarball on my home WiFi network. After entering the same passphrase on both machines, nothing happens, both remain in "Pairing in progress" state.
The router I'm using is, I think, fairly standard, it's a ZyXEL P-2812HNU-F1 with factory settings.
Are others having the problem too? Any advice where I should start looking for what goes wrong?
It's not clear from your description whether you
a) Started the pairing process independently on both machines... which probably doesn't work.
b) Started pairing on one machine, and the other one noticed and popped up a pair request alert where you re-entered the password.
If b) didn't happen, then the the pairing broadcast is not being seen by the second machine. You can try using tcpdump or wireshark to see the traffic. The traffic will look like this:
If all is going well, you should be able to see that on both the machine that's initiating the pairing and the other machine. And every other machine on the network for that matter.
Hmm... using avahi-discover the two machines can indeed see some services offered by each other. A git-annex-assistant specific problem after all?
So when I initiate a pairing on 192.168.1.63, and run tcpdump on the same machine, it looks like this:
ke@thot:~/opt/git-annex.linux$ sudo tcpdump -i eth1 host 224.0.0.1 -n tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode listening on eth1, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes 00:33:47.723989 IP 192.168.1.63.56243 > 224.0.0.1.55556: UDP, length 691 00:33:49.729242 IP 192.168.1.63.55072 > 224.0.0.1.55556: UDP, length 691 00:33:51.733358 IP 192.168.1.63.55115 > 224.0.0.1.55556: UDP, length 691 00:33:53.736730 IP 192.168.1.63.60249 > 224.0.0.1.55556: UDP, length 691 00:33:55.741641 IP 192.168.1.63.59753 > 224.0.0.1.55556: UDP, length 691
The same command (modulo different interface name) on the other machine (192.168.1.59) turns up nothing:
ke@apis:~/opt/git-annex.linux$ sudo tcpdump -i wlan0 host 224.0.0.1 -n tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode listening on wlan0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes
So, the only difference I can think of is that avahi uses a different multicast address than the one I picked for git-annex. It may be that your router is only letting that one address through even though it's supposed to let a whole range through.
I've prepared a test build of git-annex that uses the same 224.0.0.251 address avahi does. http://downloads.kitenet.net/tmp/git-annex-standalone-i386.tar.gz (i386 build) If you can try that and see how it behaves, I'll see if I need to change the address.
Yep, with the test build I see the pair request and can respond to it!
Pairing doesn't seem to succeed, but that looks like a different issue. I'll try around some more and report back, probably in a new thread.