[Nml-wg] About modelisation of the network description

[Evangelos Chaniotakis]

On Mar 27, 2008, at 2:22 PM, Aaron Brown wrote:

> Evangelos Chaniotakis wrote:
>> Disadvantage: It'll be a bit more cumbersome to look things up -  
>> users won't
>> be able to just look at an id and immediately know stuff about it.  
>> But well, we'll
>> have identifier lookup services and tools for that.
> The issue I have with meaningless, globally-unique names comes in  
> constructing the lookup service. If we have one global lookup  
> service, it's easy. If i want to know about a random id, i lookup  
> the id in that central service to find the authoritative topology  
> service for that element, and then I go look up the element's  
> information there. That centralized lookup service will have  
> tremendous issues scaling, so we'd need to distribute the lookups.  
> Since the IDs are completely random, to do that even somewhat  
> feasibly, we'd have to use a DHT as the lookup service, and no  
> matter what, every element in every domain would need to be in the  
> DHT.
>
> If we just did the "domain:uuid", each lookup service could keep the  
> authoritative topology service for a given domain which would be an  
> insignificant amount of information compared to having to know the  
> authoritative topology service for every element in every domain. As  
> soon as we define a semi-hierarchical identifier like that (and if  
> administrators want to only define the semi-hierarchy, that's fine),  
> we should think about how users might define a more strict hierarchy  
> so if/when they do it, the approach will be standardized across  
> domains.


That's a good point. Agreed.

I think DNS is a good example to follow. As far as lookup is  
concerned, domains would be equivalent
to DNS zones and referral etc could work the same way. And, of course,  
DNS has scaled pretty well.