[omniORB] Curious omniNames Behavior

[Bjorn Wennberg]

Ken Feuerman <kfeuerma@Adobe.COM> writes:

> Thanks Bjorn & Steven for your replies.
> 
> Both of you mentioned the Win32 Registry entry for recording the IOR
> generated in the start call to omniNames.  True that I haven't been
> recording that entry into the registry, because I'm working with another
> ORB that also must get a hold of the NameService root context (I record the
> root context IOR into a "well-known" file, and all processes in my system
> know to look there regardless of which ORB they're using).
> 
> But what's curious is that this problem of generating a localhost-based IOR
> has never come up before on machines with fixed IP addresses, only on
> DHCP-based machines.  In other words, on hosts with fixed IP addresses, I
> can omit the registry entry for the NameService, yet still always generate
> a correct (non-127.0.0.1) IOR.
> 
> The real question I have is:  Suppose I have the situation where omniNames
> is restarted on Machine A displaying this localhost-based IOR.  Suppose
> further that I have a hold of the original IOR with the correct IP address
> encoded from the time when the omniNames was originally started.  Should I
> expect this behavior where processes on Machine A can indeed contact the
> NameService using the original IOR, but processes on some remote Machine B
> can't (using the same original IOR)?
> 
> Thanks for your advice/help!
> 
> --Ken Feuerman.

(I'm assuming that DHCP is dynamic ip-addressing)
I added a option to BOA called -BOAiiop_name_port (included in omniORB-2.8.0).
The motivation was that I often found myself starting servers at my 
home computer that changed ip-numbers each time I logged on the network.

Starting my servers with './server -BOAiiop_name_port online30001.provider.net:12000'
forces the ip-address 'online3001.provider.net' into the IOR. On the 'far' side,
I could then resolve and connect to this hostname:port.

I do think that omniNames can be started with this option.

To answer your question: no. The original IOR is not valid anymore since you now
have omniNames running on a machine with different IP-address. If I were you,
I would write a deamon that acts as a resolver. Whenever you start a server
you register with your resolver and publish your IOR. Other servers/clients
that wishes to use your services first contact your resolver and ask for
a service - and the resolver provides the IOR to the current running service.

This is actually not a big job to do when you are dealing with corba. We did
exactly this last year and since that we have not been using omniNames :-)

bjornw>