[retronet] Random thoughts about databases and config management.

[Grant Taylor]

On 09/11/2018 10:36 PM, Mantas Mikulėnas via retronet wrote:
> Beware of 16-byte length limit on the interface names in a popular 
> operating system.

Thank you for the heads up.

I hadn't even thought about limitations on device names.

I just tested and I can create interfaces named "abcdefghijklmn" (15 
characters) but I can't create interfaces named "abcdefghijklmno" (16 
characters).

So, we will probably need to come up with some sort of mapping between 
full “${RNmemberName}-${memberNodeName}" and the 15 character equivalent.

I'm sure we can work around this.

I won't be surprised if we bump into this and have to work around it.

> As far as I know in at least MySQL tables you can make an index covering 
> multiple columns. In the `nodes` table, creating a 'unique' index over 
> (memberName, nodeName) would ensure that the combinations are unique, 
> even if nodeName itself is not.

I'm not at all surprised that such is possible.  I'm glad to have the 
confirmation.

> (Though my first attempt at a "DB" would have been a bunch of textfiles 
> in Git repository, letting the filesystem itself sort out uniqueness.)

I've been focusing on the low level networking and doing everything 
manual.  As I'm doing things repeatedly and slight variants for other 
interfaces, I'm seeing patterns that would lend themselves to computer 
generation.  So, I'm sharing what I'm seeing with others that are likely 
better at DBs than me.  I also wanted to avoid stating that we would 
need an SQL DB or a NoSQL DB or BDB or … at this point in the game.

I had the thought that some, most of this, could likely be stored in DNS 
and / or LDAP.  Both of which are trivial to replicate from central 
control points to each WG+OvS concentrator.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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