Re: Minutes / Notes

[Brian E Carpenter <brian@hursley.ibm.com>]

Keith Moore wrote:
> 
> > > 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.

But increasingly, they are based on virtualized IP addresses and include
provision for application failover to another server when the original
server fails. So the semantics of identifiers are getting more subtle.

   Brian

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Brian E Carpenter 
Distinguished Engineer, Internet Standards & Technology, IBM 

NOTE: My email will soon change to brc@zurich.ibm.com
Try that if you get failure messages.