[Spread-users] Dynamic Network?

[David Avraamides]

Jonathan,

> 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.

That's great news as this has been a constant issue with us. I hope you
are planning to allow adding nodes in the configuration file as well as
changing addresses of existing nodes. This is something we do fairly
frequently and it's a real pain to restart the spread network.

I've already written a routine for our clients to parse the config file
and randomly try each node so that we get reasonable "connection
balancing" and ignore nodes that are down, so that would tie in nicely
with your planned change.

Is there a planned release date for this?
-Dave

-----Original Message-----
From: spread-users-bounces at lists.spread.org
[mailto:spread-users-bounces at lists.spread.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan
Stanton
Sent: Tuesday, April 05, 2005 10:39 AM
To: Neil Whelan
Cc: spread-users at lists.spread.org
Subject: Re: [Spread-users] Dynamic Network?

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

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

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