Hi, On 29 May 2012, at 16:22, John MacAuley wrote:
Hot dang, a heated debate. I thought everyone had fallen into a volcano while in Iceland.
Some of the fire from the volcanoes spurred us back to the debate indeed ;)
I nearly swallowed my tongue when I read OSPF. I was hoping for something extremely simple that would just allow me to query a peer and control the retrieval of what they know. Something very similar in concept to a protocol like LDAP where I can list the top level branches of the tree (available networks), then do a detailed retrieval of the contents of a subtree (topology for the network). I would also like to put a watcher on a subtree to be notified when anything was updated.
I have no close experience with LDAP, how does it work with multiple distributed sources of information? What about the subtree notifications?
I am definitely big on reuse, but if my aging memory serves me correctly, the last time I implemented OSPF in a product it was not a trivial task. I need a bit more of trivial these days ;-)
I indeed meant an OSPF-like protocol. It may not be trivial, but it's a proven technology. It has some great extensibility features using the TLV fields. If that's off the table, we could of course also look into peer-to-peer like systems. There is some great work on distributed storage using distributed hash tables (DHT) that may also be applicable to this situation. Jeroen.