[Cu-wireless] architecture proposal

[Ralph Johnson]

In your first proposal, you said you were looking for something
simple so that you could get a network up quickly.  That seemed
to me to be an admirable goal.  So, why are you so concerned
about making a system that is so expandable?  Use fixed IP
addresses.  Once the network is working, you can keep upgrading
it.  You should plan to change your software every few weeks.

It should be easy to make a single CD that can boot on a bunch
of machines and assign an IP address to each.  The CD has a
database that maps MAC addresses to IP addresses.  The boot
process uses the MAC address to look up the IP address for
the machine.  You can hook up new machines to the net by
manually assigning them an IP address.  The next version of
the CD can include their info.

This doesn't scale, but that is not important if your goal
is to get something up quickly.  Do the simplest thing that
will work.

-Ralph