[Spread-users] Newbie plea for clarification.

[Gary Herron]

I'm starting to port my application to use spread for communication
but I fear I'm missing some basic concept, even though I've read the
user's guide end-to-end.

The application:

  I have about a dozen laptops connected by a wireless network.
  Periodically one will send a 50-100 KB message to the others.

  The features of spread which appeal here are (1) recovery of lost
  messages (since wireless networks seem prone to loss) and
  *especially* (2) the ability to broadcast (since sending one 100k
  message a dozen time to a dozen machines on the wireless network is
  annoyingly slow).

The questions:

  To get recovery of lost messages and broadcast of messages to all
  machines, do I need a spread daemon running on each machine with
  each machine's application connecting to it?  Or can I have one
  spread daemon running on the whole network with each machine's
  application connecting across the network to the one daemon?

  Basically I don't understand whether the services provided by spread
  are between multiple daemons or between a daemon and its multiple
  clients.

  If I do need a daemon per laptop, how do I handle a configuration
  file (on each machine) when the number of laptops varies from time
  to time and their IP's vary due to DHCP assignment of IP's?

  What is the difference between a "segment" and a "sub-network" (as
  mentioned in the sample.spread.conf) and a "site" (e.g., the sample
  networks with 1,2, or 4 sites as mentioned in the User's Guide)?

Don't feel shy about pointing me at some documentation which will
provide answers to all these questions, if such exists.

Thanks,
Gary Herron