[Planetlab-arch] Naming of parts

[Timothy R. <tr...@in...>]

Since there seems to be a good discussion going, I thought I'd throw
some more petrol on the fire, as it were.

Naming of slices and sites.

PLC needs to name slices and sites.  Other brokerage services
presumably will need to do something similar.  How do we do it?

Let's start with sites.  Sites are needed because PlanetLab is
site-based - if you don't have a site you don't get any slices.  Right
now we allocate short identifiers (gt, irb, etc.) to sites.   If it
continues unchecked, this process will eventually lead to long,
expensive, bitter, and obnoxious copyright lawsuits in the future
(it's only a matter of time before the International Rugby Board want
to join PlanetLab and their lawyers start coming after us at
Berkeley). Options include:

 - stay with the current, arbitrary, short names.  See above. 
 - DNS.  irb -> berkeley.intel-research.net.  Still acrimonious, but
   at least we stay out of the immediate crossfire. 
 - something else?

Slices: slice names can be scoped to the creating PI's institution,
but this doesn't alter the need to say what slice names are.

 - Readable slice names will presumably be bound "temporarily" to
   unique-for-all-time identifiers for slices, which in our case we
   have not got.  If so, shouldn't these uids be usable with the RPC
   API as well?

 - Do readable slice names get allocated by PIs at slice creation
   time?

Flame on...

 -- Mothy