[Spread-users] Using spread in secure group communication

[Adam Lamar]

Hello,

We are considering using spread for a secure group communication 
application. Spread seems to be the perfect fit, however, we are having 
trouble getting spread to work exactly as we understand it does.

We are testing spread on four machines on our local network. Each 
machine has the spread daemon running and can communicate directly with 
every other machine. We have defined our spread segment in the 
spread.conf file with a listing of each machine name and IP address. 
Communication is working with the spuser program in the client/server 
architecture, i.e. if machines A,B,C,D connect to machine A's spread 
daemon, each of the machines is able to join the group and send/receive 
messages.

The problem arises when we try to use spread in a distributed nature. If 
each machine is running the spread daemon, it is our understanding that 
machine A can connect to B, B can connect to C, and A will be able to 
communicate with C through B. However, when we tried doing this with the 
spuser program, this communication does not occur. In fact, watching the 
packet dump does not reveal that any communication whatsoever is 
occuring between the spread daemons. Is there something obvious that we 
are doing wrong?

Also, as we plan on using spread for dynamic groups, is is possible to 
define (or for spread to automatically find) where each spread daemon is 
located without restarting the spread daemon each time a new participant 
joins the network?

Thank you,
Adam Lamar