Some crude drawings to show how TN works.

the arrows pointing to the ad-hoc cloud are as follows:

• broadcast daemon simply sends out broadcast packets to every interface advertising the presence of services on the machine it runs on.
• news sync scripts. talk to both the local news server and a remote news server on the ad-hoc network (called by the mapper/dispatcher)
• Network mapper/dispatcher. listens on port 5151 for all broadcast packets coming in on all interfaces and makes a map of all computers it can currently see packets from. it then calls the news sync scripts to sync with its known hosts based on a timestamp in the network map.