[Planetlab-devel] whitelists and federation

[Thierry Parmentelat]

Larry Peterson wrote:
> On 10/5/07, Thierry Parmentelat <thierry.parmentelat at sophia.inria.fr> wrote:
>   
>> Larry
>>
>> This is great news. I am looking forward to reading more about this
>> "engine", even if the changes I am describing are still needed in the
>> short term IMO, unless this new approach is ready to get deployed. The
>> current model has its known deficiencies, and the road you are showing
>> will be invaluable in addressing them, but this is no reason for running
>> - rather badly - broken code :-)
>>     
>
> Agreed. Tony is also looking at filtering "getnodes" so it doesn't return
> the white-listed nodes (as a stop-gap).
>   
I've heard about that.
To be honest I have also considered the same kind of hack for working 
around not caching the whitelists. I could e.g. chop off whitelisted 
nodes from the list of nodes exposed to the federating plc. But the 
drawback is, TP could for instance not run PLC-native slices on a 
whitelisted node on PLE, which I think is unacceptable.

Now it could also be argued that the whitelist idea, or at least this 
implementation, was a wrong move in the first place; it sounded to me 
that having to hide some nodes away from some callers at the GetNodes 
level was not entirely right, but that's a personal opinion.
Naturally, I also understand the practical issues and the impact another 
approach would have had.

In a longer term perspective, are we starting to feel the need for 
NodeAttributes, that could provide a more generic data model for 
handling such things as whitelists ?

-- Thierry