marks@agcsun.UUCP (Mark Shepherd) (01/17/90)
Hi. I'm trying to find out if there are any existing or proposed protocols in the OSI or Internet protocol suite that will meet my requirements. If anyone knows the answer, I'd appreciate hearing it. Here's the situation: we are designing a network consisting of one or more LANs connected by some collection of bridges, routers, etc. Any node anywhere in the network may need to request services of some other node somewhere else in the network. All the nodes in the network are specialized application processors, which (a) probably don't have enough spare CPU/memory/disk to act as a name server; and (b) may be added or removed from the network (either logically or physically) at any time. The network will use a standard addressing scheme, such as IP or OSI. Here's the question: How can a node find out what node(s) offer a given service, and what their address is? There are various existing solutions: OSI directory, Internet domain name protocol, yellow pages, etc. but all of these seem to require a separate name or directory server. Restrictions (a) and (b) above would seem to preclude this approach. An alternative is for each node to keep its own list of who's on the network, but the administrative workload makes this highly unattractive. What would be ideal is a protocol where a prospective client broadcasts a request like "is there anyone out there who can provide service X" and then anyone who can sends back an appropriate reply. Can anyone tell me if such protocol exists, or suggest another approach, or explain how one of the existing standard solutions (which I am admittedly only somewhat familiar with) can do the job after all. Thanks in advance Mark Shepherd ...!ames!ncar!boulder!agcsun!marks or ...!ucbvax!avsd!dse!agcsun!marks claimer: resolving this issue is part of my job, so in some sense this message *does* represent the views of my corporation.
ww0n+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Walter Lloyd Wimer III) (01/18/90)
Excerpts from internet.tcp-ip: 17-Jan-90 Looking for distributed nam.. Mark Shepherd@boulder.co (1911) > What would be ideal is a protocol where a prospective client broadcasts > a request like "is there anyone out there who can provide service X" > and then anyone who can sends back an appropriate reply. This sounds exactly like the Internet Resource Location Protocol (RLP) described in RFC 887. I don't know of any actual implementations, though, and there seems to be a move to declare this protocol obsolete and of "historical" interest only. It's probably worth your time to look at it, however. Walt Wimer Network Development Carnegie Mellon University