From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2007 10:10:15 -0500 From: "Eric Van Hensbergen" To: weigelt@metux.de, "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] Server management In-Reply-To: <20070913141141.GA11706@nibiru.local> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <20070913141141.GA11706@nibiru.local> Cc: Topicbox-Message-UUID: bed6a512-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On 9/13/07, Enrico Weigelt wrote: > > while thinking about my plans for using 9P servers in numerious > situations I just realized that server management can become > quite complex. > > For example if an application like mozilla would move out many > jobs (ie. like currently discussing @ mozilla.org: rss-feeds), > server management can be quite complicated. We can't expect > neither the user nor the individual application to be responsible > for that. We need some zero-configuration approach. > > Actually it can be done by another server, which knows about > all the individual servers, handles startup/shutdown and tells > the clients where to find them, how to authenticate, etc, etc. > A little bit like RPC portmap. > > What do you think about this idea ? > While going with something "standard" (but a bit sticky) like zeroconf may be attractive, you may want to look at what the Plan B guys did -- IIRC they have network discovery and organization integrated into their basic framework. Essentially I think it makes the most sense to work this sort of auto-discovery into existing services (ndb/cs for instance). Accomodating zeroconf as a protocol would be nice (particularly from a cross-platform compatibility angle), but you could also do something like Inferno's registry. -eric