Re: DNS-like idea for SCSI (NIS+ maybe)
On Sat, 2004-08-21 at 12:06, Albert Cahalan wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-08-21 at 14:28, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> > Albert Cahalan <albert@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> >
> > > What about having something like DNS, so that users
> > > could name their SCSI devices? I see that www.sun.com
> > > is really 209.249.116.195, but my web browser doesn't
> > > make me type that in. There's no "mozilla -scanweb" to
> > > spit out IP addresses. I just use www.sun.com, which
> > > is much easier to remember. It's also good for Sun,
> > > since they can change the machine used for www.sun.com
> > > without having to disable the old box.
> > >
> > > Am I mistaken? Do you always type in the numbers?
> > > If you don't, please try it for a week.
> > >
> > > We do the same thing for usernames. You type "schilling"
> > > to login, don't you? I doubt you type your UID number.
> > >
> > > It's nice to be able to have the same account name
> > > on different systems, even when you can't get the
> > > exact same UID number.
> >
> > Check the man page of cdrecord for a decription of the features
> > that are handled by /etc/default/cdrecord
>
> Hmmm, that's pretty good.
>
> Do you think you could make all the other programs
> use that file too? If I define my CD-RW as QueFire
> in that file, then "mount QueFire /mnt" had ought
> to mount it I think. Also, "dd if=QueFire" should
> read from the device, and "cat QueFire" too. It could
> get kind of confusing if I had a file named QueFire
> as well though. Perhaps there is a better solution?
Maybe I didn't explain this well enough.
Consider those web addresses again. They don't
just work in Mozilla. They work with ping, and
with traceroute too! So I never bother to remember
the numbers, and I don't have to set up separate
config files for each program. Heck, I don't even
have to set up any config files.
It would really suck if traceroute only took the
numbers, and if ping wanted them in a different
format, like maybe hex or something. How could I
keep track of all that? All my Internet programs
take the names though, so it's easy. Even sending
you an email takes a name. It sure would suck if
I had to put your UID number and IP address into
some /etc/defaults/evolution file just to send an
email to you, and then in a different file if I
wanted to use mailx or kmail or mutt or pine...
I guess if I want numbers, maybe they'd work.
Nobody does that though, not even you. Do you
think you could remember my UID number and IP
address? You could have an /etc/defaults/mailx
file for them if they're hard to remember.
The concept works great for files too. Solaris never
makes me open a file by the inode number. I doubt
that would be allowed even, probably because nobody
wants to open files by inode number. Just think if
I had to do "vi 052525252" (using octal, since vi is
really old) or "pico 5a5a5a" (in hex, since pico is
much newer). Maybe a few programs would be decimal
or even binary, or they'd use dotted-quad notation
like IP addresses.
I guess there could kind of be an /etc/defaults/vi
file to look up the inodes, but you couldn't edit
it that way until after you had edited it! So that
would be rough I guess. There'd be so many of those
files to set up. You'd need one for every app, but
at least it wouldn't be a layering violation like
it is when you refer to a file by a filename.
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