The mention of a YP server that scales to the entire world
reminds me of my time at Lehman Bros. (yes, evil incarnate)
in Tokyo, 1995-96. They were using moira which I believe was
from Project Athena, to push out YP maps to all their sites
around the world. I have a feeling there were ex-MIT people
at Lehman in New York.

On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 7:09 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 05, 2018 at 11:38:50AM -0700, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >
> > > OK, found some slides:
> > >
> > > http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/lamed.pdf
> >
> > That was quite interesting!! Very impressive.  Did the reference
> > port ever get contributed to Linux?  It looks like a nice architecture.
>
> Yeah, it was sort of overkill for the problem space, but it seemed
> like the right answer.  Very much inspired by the vnode/vfs interface
> I learned in SunOS.
>
> The caches worked across reboots.  I left not long after we completed 1.0,
> Bob Mende (RIP) and some other folks took the mmap based dbm (I called
> mdbm) and put locks in each page so you could have multiple writers.
> That code made its way to yahoo and just got used for everything, they
> made it C++ (not a fan of that but whatever) and evolved it farther than
> I ever imagined.  They had DBs that were 100's of gigs ~20 years ago.
> They open sourced their stuff.
>
> I'm not sure if SGI ever open sourced it, be a shame if they didn't.
> Though the need for a YP server that scales to the entire world is
> not so clear to me.  But you could do it.
>