[Spread-users] Dynamic Network?

Jonathan Stanton jonathan at cnds.jhu.edu
Tue Apr 5 10:39:12 EDT 2005


Hello,

Each IP address of a "daemon" has to be in the configuration file. 
Spread applications and clients can run anywhere and just connect over 
TCP to a daemon. So that provides a lot of flexibility. 

As to the issue of dynamic daemon configuration a number of complexities 
arise in those settings that make it difficult to provide efficient, 
high speed service as well as guaranteed semantics -- not necessarily 
impossible but still a research problem. I'd be curious to know which 
systems you have seen that support ad-hoc networks so I can see how they 
are solving it. 

Historically, Spread was designed originally (in the early 90's) 
assuming static IP wired networks, but we have certainly been thinking 
about how to support more dynamic networks over the last five years. 

We are actually working right now on a new release of Spread that will 
support changing the nodes listed in the spread.conf configuration file 
while the set of daemons is running. That is not quite the same as 
supporting ad-hoc networks where you don't even know what IP's exist, 
but will enable more dynamic network setups. 

Cheers,

Jonathan

On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 03:28:10PM +0100, Neil Whelan wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I presume I'm right in saying that each IP address HAS to be
> specified in the configuration file for a network. I was
> just wondering why Spread doesn't support more dynamic networks.
> For example, one in which laptops with dynamically assigned IP
> addresses can form an ad-hoc group. As I'm aware, other
> group communication toolkits support this functionality. Or was
> Spread always intended to only support networks with static IP
> address nodes?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Neil.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Spread-users mailing list
> Spread-users at lists.spread.org
> http://lists.spread.org/mailman/listinfo/spread-users

-- 
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Jonathan R. Stanton         jonathan at cs.jhu.edu
Dept. of Computer Science   
Johns Hopkins University    
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