Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Ruminations on Arch Desiderata

[Andrew Suffield]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2003 at 10:26:54PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> >>>>> "Doran" == Doran Moppert <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>     Doran> On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 09:43:13PM -0700, Paul Snively
>     Doran> wrote:
> 
>     >> I think there's some tipping point: you can comfortably do
>     >> manual registration of some known public archive for scales of
>     >> up to a couple of dozen people. At the scale of a major
>     >> conference, however, that becomes problematic and DNS-SD/mDNS
>     >> become very helpful. On the other
> 
>     Doran> How useful, really, is automatic registration of archive
>     Doran> names beyond about two dozen anyway? I have 20-odd archives
>     Doran> registered and already that's too much to reliably remember
>     Doran> without some kind of meta-data (in my case, a text file and
>     Doran> ArchiveRegistry on wiki).
> 
> Right.  But wouldn't it be more pleasant (not to mention less
> typo-prone) to pull your "short-list" from a menu (which could even
> suppress the URLs), than to type them in?

It actually goes a little further than that. The system called
"zeroconf" (of which Apple's Rendezvous is an implementation) is
accurately described by its name - there should be zero configuration
involved. You plug in your network cable and you get on with your
work.

On top of this, zeroconf is a decentralised system - there is no
central directory server involved. There is therefore no configuration
involved on the part of the administrators either.

Now, zeroconf has problems. Notably, if you fail to deactivate it,
then it will probably cripple a network of any significant size - it's
quite inefficient. But that is not what zeroconf is intended for - on
small ad-hoc networks, it works quite spectacularly well.

[The application and relevance of this to arch is left as an exercise
for the reader. Note that archive registration isn't really a huge
issue compared to some of the other challenges]

-- 
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