How to translate hostname using Ruby net-mdns?

Question

I am new to net-mdns and mDNS in general, so I just have a basic understanding of how the protocol works, and I hope this question is pretty clear.

So far I have seen some examples of how to advertise a service with net-mdns, but I really need to pass a hostname alias so that my machine can be resolved as "mybox.local" and "othername" .local "(it would be nice if "othername.local" were the actual DNS alias, but this is not vital, and an A record would do just fine).

I found this script that basically does what I want, but

• I'm not as poor in Python as I am in Ruby ,-)
• it depends on avahi and will only work on Linux or BSD, and portability to other platforms will be a huge plus.
• Doing this in Ruby would mean connecting it easily in a Rails application, and I, perhaps, am very good at Rails .; -)

I cannot find mention of broadcasting host names in the documentation: I improvised a bit, read part of the source code, but have not yet succeeded.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.