On Wed, 4 Jul 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > How about ... 'server' ? :)
Wensong started the project and he got to define the terms. Considering he wasn't a native speaker of English, I thought he did pretty well. When I talked to him about his nomenclature, he had sound technical reasons for his choice. I found the terms not helpful, but being unable to think of anything better, I just kept quiet. The term persistence as used in LVS is really affinity. We should never have had "persistence". I don't particularly like "virtual" either. Looking up a few web dictionaries eg http://www.thefreedictionary.com/virtual "Computer Science Created, simulated, or carried on by means of a computer or computer network: virtual conversations in a chatroom." Since a Turing complete machine can do anything (eg make a virtual computer out of a real computer) then everything a computer does can be thought of as virtual, making "virtual" a NOP. I'm happy to call a virtual image "virtual", but I don't think calling an LVS machine a virtual server is helpful to understanding what it does. Neither do I think any of the virtualisations attained through Xen, VMWare, OpenVZ etc have any more claim to being "virtual" than does LVS, but as Gerry points out, by sheer mass, these guys will wind up owning the term. In the meantime we can now have an virtual server (LVS) of virtual realservers. How are you going to talk about that in a seminar and have anyone think you've got your head screwed on? "realservers" wasn't the original term (which I forget). A while back a few of us (of who only Horms and I are on the mailing list now) agreed on "real servers". I unilaterally chose "realservers" for the HOWTO, since you aren't going to be able to search google for "real servers" without getting millions of false positives. "servers" isn't going to be useful to search google either. For editing the HOWTO I wasn't going to be able to search for "real servers" if it split across two lines. So the HOWTO is "realservers" while most posters (including Horms) use "real servers". The same string search problem occurs for any two word phrase for the realserver. If you use "backend server" for realservers what are you going to call the 3rd-tier database machines that the realservers talk to? Volker's idea about just thinking just of the service running on the realserver has the problem that there is more than the service involved on the realserver. Your realserver needs an IP (LVS-NAT) or MAC address (LVS-DR). You need to configure the network (ARP problem for LVS-DR, default gw, and for security all packets must circulate in one direction for LVS-DR). So the realserver is pretty much a node, not just the service. Another problem with the term "servers" is that the LVS appears to the outside world to be a server (we have to do some work to make sure that the client cannot tell that it's multiple machines). So the term "server" applies to both the realservers and the LVS. The term "linux virtual server" takes up a lot of name space. Maddog Hall (the head of Linux International, a person who is good at publicising Linux) was not happy with the name when I talked to him at LVS quite a few years back. He said it should have been "Fred's Virtual Server" or "Wensong's Virtual Server", but not the "Linux Virtual Server". Any of Xen, QEMU... could also claim title to "Linux Virtual Server" if LVS didn't already have it. It would be better if no-one used the term "linux virtual server". A complicating issue is that an LVS isn't just the director; the realservers have to be configured appropriately: it's a bunch of nodes. In the commercial world there is no equivalent of an LVS - all realservers have the requirement that nothing can be changed on them and the loadbalancer box which is put in front of the realservers must do the extra work at layer 4 to present the illusion of one machine. So the project couldn't be renamed "Fred's loadbalancer", since more than the director is involved. A simple way of handling it would be to give LVS a straight out name with no implications of function, like "apache" or "squid". I have no idea about a replacement for "realserver". I'm happy to rename everything in LVS, as long as it's sensible. However you'll have to get it past Horms. As well there's a lot of name recognition in LVS (it's been going at least since 1999 and possibly 1998), and it's in the kernel - there'll be a lot of strings associated with the LVS project that would be left lying around forever, even if we changed all our terminology right now. You'd have people reading code for the foobar project, and see it talking to code from the LVS project. Joe -- Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux! _______________________________________________ LinuxVirtualServer.org mailing list - [email protected] Send requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or go to http://lists.graemef.net/mailman/listinfo/lvs-users
