On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 12:17 PM, Lamar Owen lowen@pari.edu wrote:
You forgot to mention interoperable along with effective and complete.
No, I didn't forget it.
Dynamic DNS and/or mDNS with associated addresses deals with the need for a static IP;
Is that secure?
Dynamic DNS can be, yes. It depends upon the way the zone file is updated and whether it's Internet-exposed on not.
So how can it be dynamic, but controlled at the same time?
But you've been around long enough to know that security and convenience are inversely proportional.
Sort-of. You just have to work out convenient operations over secure channels.
Is [the SRV DNS record] a standard that is universal?
RFC 2782. Becoming more common, and very common for VoIP networks using SIP.
I'll take that as a 'no' for the general case.
You just pushed the management somewhere else - you didn't eliminate it.
Why yes, yes I did push the management elsewhere. If you have a hundred thousand cloud nodes, where would you rather manage them; at the individual node level, or in a centralized manner?
I'd like to mange things the same way, regardless of the count.
Go to a cloud panel, select 'deploy development PostgreSQL server' and a bit later connect to it and get to work.
How is that easier than saying 'ssh nodename yum -y install postgresql-server'/ Something I already know how to do and how to make happen any number of ties - and something that works on real hardware and in spite of the differences in VM cloud tools.
(Yes, I know you need AAA and all kinds of other things, but for the application developer who needs a clean sandbox to test something, being able to roll a clean temp server out without admin intervention could be very useful).
At the expense of being black magic that won't work outside of that environment. I don't like magic. I don't like things that lock you in to only one vendor/tool/OS.
Your argument makes sense for devices that don't provide a reasonable interface for their own configuration. But how does that apply to a server with a full Linux distribution?
Embedded devices, with what I would consider to be full Linux distributions on them, with nothing more than a network device to manage them already exist. Network device meaning Wi Fi, too. NAS appliances are but one application; the WD MyBook Live, for instance, has a complete non-GUI Debian on it, and there are repos for various packages (for grins and giggles I installed IRAF on one, and ran it with ssh X forwarding to my laptop). Is a NAS appliance not a server?
Actually, I'd like to see a single device do all of that gunk plus have an HDMI out to act as a media player so a typical home would only need one extra 'thing' besides the computer/tablet/phone. But it doesn't matter - you still have to configure it somehow. Do you want things to guess at your firewall rules?