From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: erik quanstrom Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:56:59 -0400 To: 9fans@9fans.net Message-ID: In-Reply-To: References: <2abfc8db078f981044b3f9e69934279d@quanstro.net> <8ccc8ba40908310755q76c52917qa8483db5ed2aa9bc@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 5d5c9cd0-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 > 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