[evla-sw-discuss] DNS lookups

[James Robnett]

    Yes but that lookup only has to occur when somebody cares, not 
everytime
the L302 has something to say.    The GUI interface should do the 
lookup not the
archiver.

     There are other issues, particularly where non-SlotID boards are 
concerned
that argue against having an embedded name cache in the archive 
software.
It should probably have a caching name server (bind) that it queries.

      IP/Name pairs are invariant for SlotID boards, they're not for 
dhcp clients.
If you use a cache I'd suggest using a caching name server since it 
knows
how to use the TTL's for names, if you right your own you have no way to
tell when a name/ip pair goes stale.

       Personally I think the simplest approach is to just run an 
instance of
bind (named) on mcmonitor and point mcmonitor at itself.   Let it cache
the names.   No need to write code, just a one line change in 
/etc/resolv.conf.

James

On May 2, 2006, at 12:00 PM, Pete Whiteis wrote:

> Part of the problem is that software for a given module is generic 
> across all its IF's.   Therefore the L302 monitor point C_LOCK for 
> Antenna 13 L302-1 is indistinguishable from C_LOCK for Antenna 13 
> L302-2.   This is a problem when operations is trying to determine 
> which Module is going into alert.   The user friendly way of resolving 
> this issue (as I understand it) was for the alert handling software to 
> reverse DNS lookup the IP number and prepend the module name to the 
> alert which is displayed.
>>
>>    Alternatively is there any reason not to use a table (other
>> than redundancy of effort) for the hostname/IP pairs on
>> mctest/mcmonitor etc?
>
> Since the name/IP relationship is invariant (I hope), this approach 
> should work fine, I would think.