[Info-vax] Distributed Applications, Hashgraph, Automation

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Sunday, 25 February 2018 07:22:01 UTC, DaveFroble  wrote:
> Craig A. Berry wrote:
> > On 2/24/18 12:33 PM, Kerry Main wrote:
> > 
> >> In OpenVMS, you could also build master LD containers to image backup to
> >> new OS, customize and reboot. Maybe 15-30 minutes start to finish?
> > 
> > Then another month of tinkering to figure out how to change the node
> > name without breaking anything.
> 
> This is the result of setting up some things once, and assuming they will not 
> change.
> 
> One would hope VSI takes a critical look at such, and perhaps uses some database 
> to contain all such things.  Then there is still the question of whether such 
> data would be set at boot time, or could be changed on the fly.  That could get 
> sticky.  If not a re-boot, perhaps some other type of "refresh".  There would be 
> the question of other computers "knowing" the node name, and getting confused.
> 
> -- 
> David Froble                       Tel: 724-529-0450
> Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc.      E-Mail: davef at tsoft-inc.com
> DFE Ultralights, Inc.
> 170 Grimplin Road
> Vanderbilt, PA  15486

What are names used for (and useful for) in the context of
computers and applications (and, if necessary, users)?

How many of those uses are things that people outside the 
IT Department should care about?

How many of them are things that should be important to
the innards of OS, rather than (say) some OS-independent
distributed naming layer on top of the OS?

Host names, for anyone outside the IT department, for
example? In a seriously distributed environment, are 
host names as such not a rather dated and devalued 
concept? Perhaps they should even be deprecated (for
things being designed from scratch)?

Even back in the 1980s, in a terminal-centric environment,
things like terminal servers allowed user-visible 'service 
names' to be distinct from IT-visible host names. A bit of
'terminal server magic' was all that was needed. For LAT
users, or for telnet users (round robin DNS?).

What's the 'modern' equivalent, where what is needed is not
just users talking to application services but applications
talking to other applications, in a (semi?) standardised 
fashion? (The obvious legacy approach is to use well-known
IPhostnames and wll-known IP portnumber/name but that's 
not really helpful for reasons that should be fairly obvious)

And why do the OS internals have to get involved in this, 
except to provide the necessary facilities in a suitably 
robust and trustworthy way?

As a historical side note, I'm thinking that back in the 
1980s, there was a VAX VMS software product that did the
*technical* stuff of changing the SCSnode and DECnet 
name and stuff like that as part of deploying what Kerry
likes to call a 'golden image'. It might have been called
VAX Remote Systems Manager or something like that, and it
wasn't just intended for use within a VMScluster. No
matter. Anyway, on top of that, there was still the licencing
stuff, which DEC did one way, others did other ways (FlexLM,
dongles, etc). Three decades later there still isn't a
universally accepted licence management and enforcement 
mechanism. 

DHCP and friends (mDNS etc?) may be part of a modern 
follow on. Or may not. But I'm struggling to see why
a host name (as such) is still important (outside the
IT department). Application service names? Different
matter; they may well need to be meaningful, or at
least pre-agreed.

To an extent, the same naming issue applies to storage 
(files etc). That data someone wanted, those files 
that need restoring, are they on C: or are they on
banana$dka300:[john] or /usr/users/john, or what (and
where)?

Enlightenment welcome.