DO YOU PLAN TO SUPPORT Windows?

[shynur]

The example in the ReadMe doesn’t work at all!

[jwetzell]

Just tested on Windows 11 with v1.06 and both examples in the README work just fine.

[sergereinov]

It appears there are two problems under Windows that are unrelated (or almost unrelated) to this mDNS client/server library itself.

Problem 1: Explicit Interface Selection is Required

For the client to send multicast and the server to receive multicast, the interface must be explicitly selected.

For the client, you need something like:

var iface *net.Interface
iface = selectInterface() // select the interface somehow, e.g., one of net.Interfaces()
// ...
// create entriesCh channel, goroutine, and other stuff from the client example
// ...
// then instead of mdns.Lookup, manually create QueryParam and call mdns.Query
params := mdns.DefaultParams("_foobar._tcp")
params.Interface = iface
params.Entries = entriesCh
mdns.Query(params)

After doing this, packets from the client will start leaving the network interface and appear, for example, in the Wireshark log.

Similarly for the server:

var iface *net.Interface
iface = selectInterface() // select the interface somehow, e.g., one of net.Interfaces()
// ...
server, _ := mdns.NewServer(&mdns.Config{
	Zone:              service,
	Iface:             iface,
})

After this, the server will start listening for packets arriving on the selected network interface.

Problem 2: Multicast Loopback is Disabled by Default

It seems that in Windows, for some reason, multicast loopback (the IP_MULTICAST_LOOP socket flag) is disabled by default in practice.
This is how it manifests: The server (with the explicitly specified interface) sees packets from the network, including packets from the client example, and responds to them.
However, the server and client running on the same PC cannot communicate with each other via multicast.
Therefore, the tests (server_test.go) within this library cannot pass successfully under Windows.

Summary

Everything works out of the box under Linux. Using the library in Windows requires understanding of these network specifics, and then it will also work correctly.