Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@coraid.com>]

> 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.

dns is a bad protocol to build on.  it's not really secure
and the security measures are onerous.

not to be confused with a technical argument for or
against building on top of dns, but it's worth noting
that ndb/dns has been pushed just about as far as it
can go.  it tends to suffer from cache funnies and
can leak memory.

i'm hoping that i can get a chance to build a thread
library based dns server in the near future.

- erik