From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <8ccc8ba40908310755q76c52917qa8483db5ed2aa9bc@mail.gmail.com> References: <2abfc8db078f981044b3f9e69934279d@quanstro.net> <8ccc8ba40908310755q76c52917qa8483db5ed2aa9bc@mail.gmail.com> Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 10:09:13 -0500 Message-ID: From: Eric Van Hensbergen To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Subject: Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 5d4f17fe-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 9:55 AM, Francisco J Ballesteros wro= te: > Hmmm. we did that for FS processes on Plan B. I mean, keep a > dynamic version of a registry. It kept the list of volumes available at a > central place. > > I think it can be used as is on Plan 9, without changes. > > There was a program (I think it was called adsrv; not sure, it=B4s on the > Plan B man pages) were file servers could keep an open file as long as > they were alive. > > We didn=B4t do load balancing but it shouldn=B4t be hard to add that to > this program. > > If there=B4s interest I can dig in our worm (although it should be also > on sources). > While that sounds interesting and may be useful in its own right, a centralized server isn't really desirable -- part of the nice thing of zeroconf is moving to a decentralized environment, and ideally doing it in a scalable fashion (which isn't trivial on hundreds of thousands of cores, we certainly don't want unrestricted multicast in such an environment lest we drown in our own vomit of multicast queries and responses). Inferno also has a dynamic registry service available as another example implementation. However -- I think embracing some internet standards wouldn't be a bad thing -- DNS is certainly an existing example of an external protocol we support even though we could have invented our own. Extending the DNS support to mDNS and DNS-SD shouldn't be that big of a deal -- and most of the hard work is in defining the Plan 9 interface not actually writing the protocol support. It would allow us to play nice with other systems, which may be very beneficial in xcpu environments (which also currently suffers from a static configuration), and in particular on our Blue Gene work where front-end nodes are typically Linux or MacOSX workstations. -eric