[DotGNU]RE: Developers digest, Vol 1 #175 - 7 msgs

[Gary L. Sun]

David,

My solute to you.

Gary
================================

Message: 6
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 17:53:35 -0600
From: David Nicol <address@hidden>
To: "Mario D. Santana" <address@hidden>
CC: Adam Theo <address@hidden>,
        Norbert Bollow <address@hidden>, address@hidden
Subject: [DotGNU]NNTP as rsync

"Mario D. Santana" wrote:

> What guarantees does jabberd give of a particular message's full and
> successful propagation through the p2p network, i.e. of it's arrival at
> all the nodes? This is basically a 2-phase commit, and though for some
> services it may not be worth the overhead, other services (e.g., auth)
> will probably need a strong guarantee of sane behavior in pathological
> cases like splits.

usenet is very good at propagation between peering machines and even
has strong authentication mechanisims (pgp-signing) to protect
access to the control channel.

Even though universal connectivity has mostly removed the issue
except in terms of bandwidth use (imagine a comparison of the bandwidth use
of a full news server against a web proxy cache network which would
refer to servers containing posts -- the proxy system only needs to
distribute
the titles to the end users, instead of millions of articles nobody reads)

It is easy to imagine a self-updating system that uses something like
NNTP to distribute patches rather than pounding a central server, at least
for the mirror network if not for the consumer nodes.