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

[Doran Moppert]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 09:43:13PM -0700, Paul Snively 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 
 [snip]

How useful, really, is automatic registration of archive names beyond about
two dozen anyway? I have 20-odd archives registered and already that's too
much to reliably remember without some kind of meta-data (in my case, a text
file and ArchiveRegistry on wiki).

Really it sounds to me as though you're barking up the wrong tree: it would
make more sense to me to have an HTTPD somewhere (which can register itself
through DHCP or various DNS hacks - ask Verisign (verisign-must-die.com)
about this) with a well-known URL featuring a table similar to
ArchiveRegistry. On the same box I'd chuck ViewARCH and get it to update its
cache every 15 mintues or so.

If I'm walking into a conference and I want to auto-publish, I don't think
this is arch's job but rather that of the network services on my box. As
(Miles?) pointed out, arch doesn't care whether anyone else can see my
archive: why should it? When DHCP gives me an address the server can query a
well-known URL on my machine or send me instructions on manually publishing.
Heck it could probably be done by creative use of a VCard field. Which seems
closer to what would be desirable at a tech conf in my world ...

(disclaimer: I know nothing about rendezvous, zeroconf, DNS-SD or any of these
things. I am however speaking from experience making a place for ad-hoc
networks when I can say "just let the DHCP server set you up, then go to
'www' and join the forum.")

d.