[Spread-users] Newbie plea for clarification.

[Gary Herron]

On Wednesday 17 December 2003 05:49 am, Jonathan Stanton wrote:

> Yes you need a daemon on each machine to take advantage of network
> broadcasts.

So broadcast is daemon-to-daemon and not daemon-to-client.

> At a semantic level (the meaning of each message, whether it is reliable
> or ordered) it doesn't matter. Spread will provide those guarnatees no
> matter how many daemons are running. However, performance characterists
> will depend on where the daemons are running.

That's clear -- thanks.

> This is a bit trickier. If their IP addresses can change "while spread is
> running" then it won't work right. If you can restart spread when the IP
> changes, then a potential solution is to write a config file with all of
> the potential IP addresses in it, and then when spread restarts it will
> configure itself as whatever name matches the IP address it is using
> (assuming the dns is setup right)

My situation is not that convoluted.  The DHCP server is under my
control and does not reassign IP's at run time. So I can create (once)
a config file like this:

  Spread_Segment  192.168.0.255:4803 {
        m100               192.168.0.100
        m101               192.168.0.101
        m102               192.168.0.102
        m103               192.168.0.103
        m104               192.168.0.104
        m105               192.168.0.105
        m106               192.168.0.106
        m107               192.168.0.107
        m108               192.168.0.108
        m109               192.168.0.109
        ... continuing throught all possible (but fewer than 128) IP's ...
  }

In the test I just ran, it doesn't seem to matter that the names
assigned in the config file have nothing to do with the host names
known to DNS.  

True?



One more question please.

It is possible for a daemon on any of the configured machines (as
specified in the 'Spread_Segment') to join at any time, but is there
any sense of being able to do this at run time?  That is, can a new
machine (not mentioned in the config file )be added to a segment or a
new segment added to the mix without stopping all daemons, rewriting
all config files and restarting all daemons?

Thanks for your time,
Gary Herron