[evla-sw-discuss] DNS lookups

[James Robnett]

    A while back there was a problem with the monitor software
doing DNS lookups every time a MIB created a monitor point.
Normally this wouldn't have been a problem except that this
particular device was generating hundreds of points/second
which caused hundreds of lookups/second which swamped
the DNS server.

    We don't have quite the same issue but while tracking a
different problem at the site I saw that we have a fairly heavy
aggregate lookup load going on.

    Is there a real reason why the monitor software needs to
know hostnames for every point?   Why can't everything be
reported and stored as IP addresses and if a human needs
the hostname do the lookup then.

    Most systems work this way.

    Alternatively is there any reason not to use a table (other
than redundancy of effort) for the hostname/IP pairs on
mctest/mcmonitor etc?

     If that's not an option we should consider making those
systems that really need to do lookups on a frequent basis
be DNS caching slaves so they have their own table.

James