[AG-TECH] SharedApp on non-venue-client machine?

[Brian Corrie]

Hi Markus,

We have run into exactly the same type of problem for some of the work
we are doing. There really is no way around this at the moment that I am
aware of. We have talked to Ivan and company about this. Here is a
paraphrase from an email I sent to the Argonne folks about this...

Brian says something like this:
"Shared apps don't know anything about nodes. Thus if we have a
service as a shared app there is no way to get it to run on another
machine in a node. In this instance we would want to have a shared app
that provides a service check the node config and
start up all of the services of that type in the node. Thus we would
like the shared apps to negotiate with the node to determine how to
deliver a specific service on a specific node."

What you (and we) are looking for is something that looks like a shared
app but has some of the functionality of a node service.

Here is my soapbox stand on this:

1) Requirements are specific to venues. That is, the services required
are determined by the type of meeting being carried out. This includes
parameter settings for those services (my meeting may require good
quality video or not so good). This is similar to the Shared App model 
we have now in the sense that the shared apps are specific to a venue.

2) Node services are specific to nodes. They describe the capability of
the node.

3) When someone enters a venue on a given node, the venue client
negotiates with the node manager about the node services that are
required for the venue. It starts up the services on the appropriate
machines, with the correct parameter values, for the node.

This goes away from the Shared App model in the sense that there are
only node services, but the types of node services differ based on the
venue (which is what you get with shared apps). Thus venue configuration
becomes much more important (and flexible). This is the area that we are
working on at the moment (with the help of the Argonne folks), trying to
make this fit in the current AG model as well as trying to determine if
this is an appropriate direction for AG to move in general...

My $0.02 worth 8-)

Cheers,

Brian


Markus Buchhorn wrote:

> Hi All
> 
> I'm looking at better ways of managing our (multi-machine) nodes. One of the things I want to do is have the operation be remote to the node, by having the venue-client running on (for example) the control machine. (I'd really like to have multiple venue clients (or just one?) on a single machine, operating multiple separate AG nodes across our campuses, but that's a little way off yet).
> 
> The one thing that gets in the way seems to be that SharedApps (browser, presentations, etc.) appear on the same machine as the venue client. This seems to tie the SharedApps, the venue client and the display machine together. That seems to be against the architecture of distributed node-services and service managers. So, I'm probably doing something wrong :-)
> 
> Is there a way of configuring a node so that the sharedapps appear on the display machine (say), rather than the venue-client machine? 
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Cheers,
> 	Markus
> 
> Markus Buchhorn, ANU Internet Futures             |Ph: +61 2 61258810
> Markus.Buchhorn at anu.edu.au                        |Fx: +61 2 61259805
> The Australian National University, Canberra 0200 |Mob: 0417 281429