Monday May 16, 2005 Sun-MS Interoperability
While not involved directly in the ongoing interoperability work, it is not hard to understand the benefits of having one definitive source of information on the network.If you're familiar with Solaris, you will be aware of the /etc/hosts and /etc/inet/hosts files, both of which are used to translate between IP addresses and host names. (The reason for having two is for reasons of Unix history.) Ignoring the ipnodes file which now exists in Solaris (and can complicate things further), the fact is that utilities on Solaris will access one or the other of the hosts files depending on their heritage and history. We want all of these utilities to have the same view of the network irrespective of the interface (i.e. the file in this case) that they use to access the information. In Solaris this is done by having /etc/hosts being a symbolic link to /etc/inet/hosts so that whichever interface you use to access the information, you end up going to the single central information source of /etc/inet/hosts (whether you know this or not - and do you really want to care anyway so long as you get the information you need).
Having the ability to access a single directory in a heterogeneous environment (which is an essential feature of a large data centre which has to support different workload types) is a useful thing to have. Hopefully we are getting closer to the day where customers can choose the best platform and application for the task at hand (as there is no "one size fits all" compute solution) without having to worry about how they are going to integrate with their existing infrastructure. Everything should just be able to talk to everything (assuming they have permission, of course 
).
( May 16 2005, 11:00:48 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]