There's JINI by Sun which kinda aims to do what is proposed here.
I haven't taken much of a look at it but it seems possible aside from the
fact that it uses Java. It's actually a sort Catch-22 situation.
Broadcasting is a Bad Thing but you need to broadcast with some regularity
to advertise your services. Maybe multicast? What we need is a fast enough
network that broadcasting does not degrade performance too much :)
Building this on top of DNS is iffy. DNS is convulated enough
without tacking on another data type but I guess with DDNS and maybe a
SERVICE record type, it could work but it comes back to the problem of
knowing who to ask in the first place unless you are proposing that DNS
answer to broadcast requests. LDAP is not feasible. I am a big fan of LDAP
but using it for this purpose would be a gross misuse. This information is
too dynamic. LDAP is basically a database or a db file with a whole bunch
of preindexed fields for quick lookup. Reindexing every time some new
machine announces a service would be unacceptable esp. since reindexing is
very resource intensive. But yes, technically it is feasible. I do agree
that any system that is used needs to announce service rather than host.
But there needs to be abitration as to who the authorative machine is for
that resource. Of course this opens a huge can of worms for
man-in-the-middle attacks =)
--Jauder
On 31 Aug 1998, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Actually, something I'd like to see is a more general way to report
> the availability of services. Coda is much less of an issue (it
> manages its own namespace), but there are all kinds of other server
> reporting that would be good.
>
> Perhaps this could be built on top of DNS or LDAP.
>
> It's probably worth pointing out that needing to know which server a
> service resides on is a Bad Thing[TM]; it is vital that this system
> allows for the network manager to abstract this out (announce the
> print services on "printserver.domain.com" rather that
> "honda.domain.com", because next week the print server might be
> running on "volvo.domain.com" instead.)
>
> -hpa
>
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