skrenta@amix.commodore.com (Rich Skrenta) (06/14/91)
What happens if two processes or servers choose the same port address? Presumably one could broadcast a locate request to see if a chosen port was already in use. However, this has two problems: 1) if you find one that is already in use, security is compromised, since you now know the secret port number to listen on. 2) the locate request may fail, but later a remote service could publish its port number locally within your domain, thus creating a conflict. Certainly the likelyhood of port collisions is small, but collision are possible (definitely if many sites were using poor random number generators). And with a large network of Amoeba systems, it seems that occaisional collisions would be certain to happen sooner or later. How does Amoeba deal with this? Rich -- skrenta@amix.commodore.com