Network Topography discussion
Note: This discussion seems to be mostly superseded by ticket:143.
This page for discussion and thoughts on the network topography code.
Right now (at least looking at the XML captured at SC05), network topography is represented by giving each node Network element. This contains data that can be used to construct an undirected graph of the network's topography.
Network Type
The Network element has a type attribute, that can be set to Infiniband or whatever. What if a node is both on Infiniband and Fast Ethernet?
Proposal
What if we move this type attribute to the Device element, and call it something like transport? So we'd have:
<Network>
<Device transport="infiniband">
<ID>....</ID>
....
</Network>
Thoughts?
Comment by samm on Sat Apr 8 16:01:18 2006
Multiple networks per node is certainly a viable possibility. Adding additional network monitoring features to Fountain is something we've considered after polishing the Infiniband support. So it would probably be a good idea to design the Network element with support for multiple types, or transports, or whatever we dicide to call it.
The way I see it, we could either have a Device element for each network type, or have a separate Network element like so:
<Network type="Infiniband"> ... </Network> <Network type="Ethernet"> ... </Network> <Network type="SneakerNet"> ... </Network>
Comment by mekstran on Sat Apr 8 16:22:43 2006
Maybe this is just because of how I'm building my objects (each node has "connectivity" object that describes its networking capabilities), but it seems like the Device element having the type would probably be a better solution.
It also seems, to me, to be more consistent with the rest of SSSRMAP - having some kind of element that is duplicated without some kind of containing element is unprecedented in SSSRMAP (at least in the Node object).
