Re: Reality Check and Ideas

August Zajonc (augustz nospam at bigfoot.com)
Tue, 09 Mar 1999 15:10:14 -0800

Uh oh... The KISS people are getting into the Second System Effect, just
like the guy on the IT comittee here who suggested we throw out our fibre
optic switched ethernet for cablemodems to some cable company somewhere...

Folks, a db backend and an HTTP/XML frontend is not only not complicated, it
is easy to implement for us programers... There are countless little widgets
that can do http stuff for every development platform...

Doing DNS is well, stupid :) There is little flexibility, how do you submit
updates (another mechanisim will have to be built anways...) and a whole
host of ther problems... Youch... Each DNS record contains ALL the fields,
we'll be passing back gigs before we know it? With an http query different
results could be returned (cover art or not etc...)

Before people post with brand new ideas, perhaps they could point out the
flaws in the current ideas that the idea seeks to fix, and what improvments
lie ahead. Remeber, future flexibilty is key, simplicity is jey (plenty of
people can host a cgi script for http lookups, how many can provide DNS
servers, and all that entails?)

August

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim P. Gerla <timg nospam at means.net>
To: cdindex nospam at freeamp.org <cdindex nospam at freeamp.org>
Date: Tuesday, March 09, 1999 2:56 PM
Subject: Re: Reality Check and Ideas

On Wed, Mar 10, 1999 at 12:41:26AM +0100, Andreas Bogk wrote:
> "Tim P. Gerla" <timg nospam at means.net> writes:
>
> > * Please, let's not overengineer the project. KISS! (keep it simple,
stupid)
>
> Yes, sounds like a typical candidate for the Second System Effect.
>
> It just occured to me that one could use NNTP to distribute and query
> the database, just specify a mapping between MD5-hashes (or whatever)
> and message IDs, create an alt newsgroup, and disable the expiry on
> dedicated servers for that group. How many CDs are out there? More
> than the average number of postings on a news server at any given
> time?
>
Just had a stroke of genius (with a lot of help from other places, give me
no credit)

Why not use DNS? It's already there. It's scalable, distributed, workable
over proxies, etc. All you have to do is %-encode the data stream. Just like
reverse lookups..

Lookup 0d0d0d0d or whatever, grab the info.

Any DNS people here? I don't know much about BIND and so on.

--
-Tim
timg nospam at means.net | http://flow.geol.und.nodak.edu/

Once you had gold...once you had silver Then came the rains...out of the blue Ever and always...always and ever Time gave both darkness and dreams to you -Enya