From: patrick@Verity.COM (Patrick Horgan)
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 95 13:12:48 PDT
To: ab411@detroit.freenet.org
Subject: Re: SSL trouble
Message-ID: <9508282009.AA20089@cantina.verity.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


David Conrad wrote, quite well:
> 
> Patrick Horgan <patrick@Verity.COM> writes:
> >I did a distributed scheme for something else that had two levels, a master
> >and a group of slaves.  Only the slaves talked to the master.  For this 
> >effort I think a variation of the idea would be better.  Have all of the
> >brutes contact the master, who will, in the first transaction assign them
> >to the next slave in a round-robin fashion.
> 
> Why not just have the brutes pick a slave at random?  Of course, you need
> to give them a complete list of slaves to choose from.  But then the only
> difference between the master and the slaves will be that the master
> doesn't get any keyspace (it's got it all to begin with) and doesn't
> report any results upward.
> 

I think that this is a quite good idea with one caveat.  That we use a 
good random algorithm.  As people on this list are quite aware, many
algorithms that ship in libraries of commercial OSs are flawed in one
way or another.

Perhaps a combination of the two: give the whole list rotated in a
round-robin fashion, and let the client do with it as they will.  There
are enough coders on this list that we'll soon see independently 
developed versions of the client software, (although a published 
protocol for talking with the slaves would be nice), and some might
like to draw the first from the list, another randomly choose one,
etc...

Patrick
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