> > > > Network-wide unique identifiers like task-IDs, ports, etc... are a nice > > > > thing to have. One idea may be to organize all nodes of a collective > > > > in a distributed kind of (hurdisch) filesystem. IDs would then be > > > > simple paths and could be located with some kind of distributed > > > > lookup() functionality: > > > > > > It was always my plan to have a single IP address for a collective. > > > (The collective might use IP for communication between its component > > > systems, but those addresses would be entirely internal.) > > > > You certainly want to assign a multicast IP address to the collective, > > right? > > No, that's not necesary. At least in IPv4, multicast is too uncertain > to rely on. Hmmm... I use multicasting on *BSD boxes very heavily since years and it works flawlessly. Cisco used to have some bugs in their PIM Sparse tree pruning implementation, but they fixed that approx. 9 months ago. I used multicasting accross the public Internet without problems (but alas not so intensively).
Of course, I can't say anything about the pfinet IP stack implementation. If that proves to be faulty, it may be a good idea to grab the TCP/IP code from, say, FreeBSD and wrap that into a bsd_pfinet translator. Sure, it will only happen when it is really needed ;-) > But there are other tricks that can work. :) Of course, one can always simulate multicasting or avoid it completely. That is not a big issue. Please tell us more about collectives. That is a very hot topic! -Farid. -- Farid Hajji -- Unix Systems and Network Admin | Phone: +49-2131-67-555 Broicherdorfstr. 83, D-41564 Kaarst, Germany | [EMAIL PROTECTED] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - + - - - - - - - - - - - - One OS To Rule Them All And In The Darkness Bind Them... --Bill Gates. _______________________________________________ Bug-hurd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-hurd
