Re: Minutes / Notes

[Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>]

> > many p2p apps do their own routing because they are forced to do so,
> > not because this is a desirable or acceptable burden to impose on
> > applications.    also, what works acceptably well in a system to
> > transfer widely-replicated files does not necessarily work well in a
> > system where host identity is important.
> 
> There are pretty few systems were "host identity" is what really
> matters; in most cases, you want something like domain or user
> identity. For example, "www.google.com" is not exactly 1 single host. 

I don't know any way to enumerate those systems, but there's an
important class of systems for which this does not apply - the systems
for which some amount of required data lives in the private memory of
some process which lives on a particular host (NOT in a domain).  This
applies to most of the distributed computing systems I know about.  And
as long as hosts don't make their memory directly accessible by outside
processes, such systems will quite reasonably exist.

Of course, as long if you keep using the web as an example of a typical
distributed app, you're going to miss those important counterexamples.

Keith