NAME RESOLUTION (was BIOMOO)

P. Murray-Rust (mbglx@s-crim1.dl.ac.uk)
Sat, 28 Jan 1995 21:45:58 +0000 (GMT)

Bill,
I am EXTREMELY sympathetic to your problem (thanks Robin for
tracking it down.) What you have is a name resolution problem, somewhere
close to your sysadmin. Machines on the net have a 4-integer address
which is absolute and should always work. However, if a service moves to
another machine, that will have a different address and you will have to
change it. Therefore hardcoding addresses will usually bite you later
when you aren't expecting it.

There is a complex and wonderful scheme for using symbolic names
on the Net (http, telnet, mail, etc) which is the Domain Name Service. (DNS).
This caches a list of symbolic addresses against the numbers. When
someone changes an address or adds a new one, it propagates through the
system like magic. This takes a finite time. DNS also does other clever
things and can hols several names for a given machine.

It has taken us at BBK about 2 months to get to the stage we are
at - still by no means perfect. The world is divided into three parts:
- those who don't understand DNS (includes me)
- those who do and have knowledge and power (sysadmins)
- those who do and have no ppower.
Only the second category can solve your problem. The only way I can
tackle it is by a mixture of free drinks, boxes of choccies, or other
bribes. Some people try organisational power. If it doesn't work you
are worse off than before because these people are close to omnipotent.

Best of luck.

P.

Peter Murray-Rust (pmr1716@ggr.co.uk) Glaxo Research & Development, Greenford,UK
mbglx@seqnet.dl.ac.uk, http://www.dl.ac.uk/CBMT/pmr.html (Thanks to AlanBleasby)