How do local processes connect when host is offline?

[dpc]

Surprisingly (to me), when I turn off the wifi, and run two Iroh based apps they connect just fine. Correction: actually, I was testing wrong commit. It does not work.

I tried the same with sendme send --ticket-type id and that does not work.

Would enabling local discovery do the trick? Are there any plans on having a built-in discovery on the same host? I realize this is a corner case, probably not very important for most use-cases Iroh would be used for, but ... it isn't truly universal connectivity, if it doesn't work between processes on the same host. :D

[flub]

So this device has no other network connectivity other than the wifi? Yeah, in that case it won't maintain connection.

But indeed, it is a matter of building discovery services. Maybe the most universal thing would be have something nDNS like running on the loopback interface? Though depending on your platform, maybe you'd like something over a d-bus interface or some file/socket in some XDG_WHATEVER directory.

[dpc]

Yes. This is just my desktop computer where i turn off wifi and check if things are still working.

Unfortunately there's not a single approach that I can think of, but some combination of:

• unix socket in a fixed place
• listening on loopback on a fixed port (range?)

could maybe do it. nDNS maybe too, no idea how much complexity etc. it is.

[flub]

I created #3284 as I think this is an interesting enough usecase. We are very unlikely to pick this up before 1.0 though, so I'm not promising anything. Though that shouldn't stop you or anyone else from experimenting with some discovery service in this area.