Communicating between 130 hosts with Spread

Hi,

We're looking into using Spread for distributing ATC surveillance data from a 
central servers to a fleet of about 130 workstations.  Most of these (~90) are 
in the same building as the servers, on 3 different VLANs, but the rest are 
distributed between 4 remote sites (one sharing one of the central VLANs, the 
others with their own VLAN), with WAN connection to the centre.

Obviously we need the link to be reliable and highly available.

I've done some limited experiments with a couple of machines, configuring them 
as described in the User Guide, and I like the look of Spread - it seems to 
fit our requirements nicely. However, the User Guide talks about a maximum of 
128 hosts/daemons per network segment and an overall limit of 128 
machines/daemons.

So, an overall limit of 128 hosts would seem to suggest Spread might not the 
thing after all.

However, I'm not clear from the User Guide as to whether it is 
sensible/possible to have multiple hosts on a VLAN sharing a daemon, and if so 
what the pros and cons of this might be. If possible/sensible, I envisage a 
pool of hosts sharing a number of daemons, so that if a daemon-less hosts 
loses the daemon it is using,, it can change to another in the pool.

I'm a near-complete newbie with Spread. Can someone more learned give me a few 
pointers?

Thanks.
-- 
Jim Hague
[email protected]              Never trust a computer you can't lift.
LAIC Aktiengesellschaft            +44 1865 980647    Mob +44 7941 697732

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