Aaron Brown wrote:
Evangelos Chaniotakis wrote:
Disadvantage: It'll be a bit more cumbersome to look things up - users won't be able to just look at an id and immediately know stuff about it. But well, we'll have identifier lookup services and tools for that. The issue I have with meaningless, globally-unique names comes in constructing the lookup service. If we have one global lookup service, it's easy. If i want to know about a random id, i lookup the id in that central service to find the authoritative topology service for that element, and then I go look up the element's information there. That centralized lookup service will have tremendous issues scaling, so we'd need to distribute the lookups. Since the IDs are completely random, to do that even somewhat feasibly, we'd have to use a DHT as the lookup service, and no matter what, every element in every domain would need to be in the DHT.
I do not think that a central lookup service will have scaling issues for a long time. Even if optical network were to take off like a super-sonic rocket, we're talking infrequent requests, with a minimal data footprint. I'm not advocating a central lookup service, but we should have better arguments than the simple "it does not scale". Jeroen. -- My email address has changed to <vdham@uva.nl> (The science has disappeared from my address, but I'm still doing it)