Re: automating the network: the big picture...

[Rob Austein <sra@hactrn.net>]

At Tue, 11 Feb 2003 09:07:39 -0800, James Kempf wrote:
> 
> Are people drawing a distinction between providing service location information
> and providing service configuration information? It seems to me that providing
> location information is really only possible from a third party, whereas
> configuration information can be provided by the service itself once it is
> found.

The distinction is useful, but I don't follow the rest, unless you
count things like a working multicast infrastructure as a third party.

That is: assuming co-location of the config protocol server engine and
the service for which it's providing that config protocol, one can use
multicast to locate the server's config protocol engine directly[*].

Multicast infrastructure, unfortunately, is a real problem, but the
available alternatives all seem to illustrate RFC 1925 2(6).

[*] Not an original proposal, as those of you who follow the IPv6 WG
know all too well....