[Info-vax] Distributed Applications, Hashgraph, Automation

[DaveFroble]

Kerry Main wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Info-vax [mailto:info-vax-bounces at rbnsn.com] On Behalf Of Jan-
>> Erik Soderholm via Info-vax
>> Sent: February 25, 2018 6:20 AM
>> To: info-vax at rbnsn.com
>> Cc: Jan-Erik Soderholm <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Info-vax] Distributed Applications, Hashgraph,
> Automation
>> Den 2018-02-25 kl. 11:39, skrev 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)?
>>>
>> You do need *some* reference to whatever you'd like to connect
>> to, I guess.
>>
>>> 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?
>>>
>> Most used do not care which of the servers you are actually
>> "using" when you access www.google.com.
>>
>>> 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)?
>>>
>> And replaced with, what?
>>
>>> 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?).
>>>
>> Very much like having an DNS A-record for the "host IP address"
>> and one or more DNS ALIAS-record for the "service names" (pointing
>> to the A-reord). If you always use the name of an ALIAS-record, the
>> IP address of the A-reocrd can change with no changes for the user.
>>
>> It is just a differnt name. A "LAT service name" could be seen as
>> a IP DNS ALIAS record.
>>
>>> 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.
>>>
> 
> The present day term for what is being discussed here is "service
> location transparency".
> 
> Users should be able to connect to a "service" (e.g. cluster alias)
> without having to understand the underlying infrastructure in terms of
> things like site location, node names, disk names etc.
> 
> For those with grey or disappearing hair, this is not a new concept.
> 
> Remember all the 30 year old discussions about the "IT Utility"?  For
> those who have forgotten, simply google "IT Utility".
> 
> I remember DEC Canada CIO pushing this Utility concept back in the old
> days. His push was that users should be able to connect to a "service"
> like plugging into a "electrical service" receptacle without having to
> know if what rating, phase or cost it incurs.
> 
> Article from 2003 (and the concept goes back much further than this)
> <http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly/101165> 
> "Utility pricing provides a customer with a financial plan to enable a
> monthly cost for using a resource based on an agreed usage."
> 
> Does this sound like a "public cloud" business model?
> 
> What's old is new again.

I'd say "it just is".  Not new or old.

A properly set up application does this for users.

For example, the first thing a user sees is a menu.  The user then selects what 
task or application to use, for example, AP or AR of GL or ....  The user 
doesn't have to know where the actual executables, or data, or ... is located. 
However, something has to know this.

This is the way decent applications have been set up for quite some time now. 
Your "what's old is new again", however, it's more like "this is always how it's 
done".

Consider what happens in such scenarios.  A user logs in, and is running some 
set of instructions, a command procedure, that keeps the user from ever seeing 
DCL.  Locations and such are for the set-up of the application, not for the users.


-- 
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