[Spread-users] what configuration for a LAN of 150 machines dynamicallygrouped by 2 or 3 ?

[John Lane Schultz]

Philippe Reinquin wrote:
> We are also looking for potential solutions to replace it (and solutions 
> with support on contrary of ISIS)

ISIS was one of the first group communication toolkits to be built.  Spread came 
later and is a more modern design that supports many of the same communication 
paradigms and has been ported successfully to most *nix platforms.

In addition, my company, Spread Concepts, offers both support and consulting 
services with respect to Spread installations.  If you are interested, then 
please contact us at info at spreadconcepts.com

> Yes they are all on the same sub-network.
> 
> What about my other solution ?
> "team1" composed of tux1, tux3 and tux4 running "Spread -c Spread1.conf"
> "team2" composed of tux2 and tux5 running "Spread -c Spread2.conf"
> 

It depends on what you want.  Do you want clients on all of the machines to be 
able to perceive clients on all the other machines?  Or do you really only want 
clients in the same group/team to be able to communicate and perceive each other?

If it is the latter, then you can certainly break your system down into multiple 
spread configurations that do not intercommunicate and this will get away from 
the limit on the number of daemons -- the "drawback" being of course that 
clients joining these different configurations cannot intercommunicate through 
Spread.  If you chose this path, then the only reason to include all 150 
machines in the different configurations is to ease moving a machine from one 
configuration to another.  "Moving" a machine from one configuration/team to 
another would simply require killing the spread daemon and then restarting it 
while pointing it at the new configuration file.

Also note that Spread 4 (in release candidate 2 right now) has the ability to 
allow for dynamic reconfiguration that can often not require daemon shutdown or 
mass client disconnection.  However, in the case where you are changing a 
daemon's basic communication parameters (i.e. - multicast group/port) I believe 
the daemon will simply commit suicide.

Cheers!

-- 
John Schultz
Spread Concepts LLC
Phn: 443 838 2200
Fax: 301 560 8875