[AG-TECH] Multiple use for quick bridge

[Don Morton]

I'm just wondering if others see the multiple
potential for quickbridge, particularly in the
world of PIGs.  

Sort of by accident, sort of by necessity, a few
of us in Alaska and Montana have used the QuickBridge
not as a "bridge" but as a "rendezvous point" for
2-3 sites at a time who only have unicast.  This
is incredibly versatile, and if folks are somewhat
conscious of bandwidth, allow for small meetings
from just about anyplace that has network.  Up in 
Fairbanks last week it was a no-brainer to use my
wireless laptop to help someone in Missoula do
some testing (all via unicast), and get a petroleum
engineer up and running on a PIG within 15 minutes.
The quickbridges are so easy to set up and, makes
great use of those 100MHz Pentiums that would otherwise
be thrown away.

I realize the AG community has been promoting migration
to multicast, and I understand the reasons, but the
hard truth is that out here in frontier regions most
people won't see multicast for years to come, so
the AG environment ends up being somewhat elitist.
These rendezvous points seem to be just the ticket
for pushing this technology out to the masses.

One of our folks yesterday fired up a quickbridge
on a non-multicast network, just to see if it could
serve solely as a "rendezvous point" and it worked
fine.  So, right off the bat, seems you can set up
several rendezvous points on one machine and just
plug in bogus multicast addresses in the configuration.
Only problem is that if the network ends up going
multicast someday, you might end up interfering with
someone out there - I wonder how hard it would be to
configure quickbridge so that in these "rendezvous
point" usages, you don't even need a multicast address
entry - my guess is it wouldn't be hard - on the
surface it looks like a simple implementation.

The only "hitch" I see, and it's not a majour one, is
that the quickbridges, although very easy to install
and configure by techies, probably isn't something we
want Joe/Jane Sixpack to be mucking with.  I wonder if
there's any interest in having an interface built that
allows users to quickly set up a simple temporary 
rendezvous point for meetings "on the fly."  Hell,
when you think about it, there's no reason you
can't just have the quickbridge/rendezvous point
running on one of the participating PIGs (assuming
the PIG is a Linux one - don't know if quickbridge
can run on Windows).  If there's interest in this,
it might be worth my while to give it to a student
as an independent study or something.
--


 **************************************************************
   Don Morton                   http://MRoCCS.cs.umt.edu/~morton/
   Department of Computer Science       The University of Montana
   Missoula, MT 59812 | Voice (406) 243-4975 | Fax (406) 243-5139