> I agree with the last sentence, but knowing about SL addresses > tells you nothing at all about network topology. The two just > aren't related. Assigning SL addresses requires knowledge of > the topology (as does assigning global addreses), but to use > one doesn't. All the hosts do is use them.
actually a distributed app does in some sense need to know about network topology in order to use SL addresses, because a component might send a referral using an SL address to another component that isn't at the same site. without some notion of topology the app has no idea which address to use in the referral. it's very much like the problem that occurs with NATs. the app could simply refuse to use SL addresses, but then it wouldn't be able to use components at sites that don't have global addresses. though I expect it's more likely that the app would pass multiple addresses in the referral and let the components receiving those referrals do trial-and-failure until they find an address which works to reach the desired component, than actually trying to make the app aware of topology. still, it stinks no matter how you do it. Keith -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
