A.L.F.R.E.D. gathers status information in networks with dynamically
chaing topologies, e.g. a Wifi mesh with mobile clients. It is a
user space daemon for distributing arbitrary local information
over the same mesh/network in a decentralized fashion. This data
can be anything which appears to be useful - originally designed
to replace the batman-adv visualization (vis), you may distribute
hostnames, phone books, administration information, DNS information,
the local weather forecast ...
.
Users may insert information by using the alfred binary on the command
line, or use custom written programs to communicate with alfred directly
through unix sockets. Once the local data is received, the alfred
daemon takes care of distributing this information to other alfred
servers on other nodes somewhere in the network. As addressing scheme
IPv6 link-local multicast addresses are used which do not require any
manual configuration. A user can request data from alfred, and will
receive the information available from all alfred servers in the network.
