[Bamboo-Users] Understanding gateways + put/get

[Olaf Görlitz]

Hi all,

I have implemented a distributed application that keeps some data in a
shared index on top of Bamboo. Recently, I tried to improve my automatic
gateway setup to get rid of static config files for each node. Somehow,
I broke the configurations and now I tried to better understand the
whole gateway mechanics.

The first example 'Running Bamboo' in the Bamboo User Guide [1] provides
two config files [2,3] which contain a global node_id and 6 stages
(Network, Router, Rpc, StorageManager, WebInterface, and Vivaldi).

To put and get values in a DHT the FAQ section 'How do I use the storage
layer' [4] refers to the test script bamboo/test/location-test-menu.pl
which creates config files with three more stages (Dht, DataManager, and
Gateway).

If I understand it correctly, the gateway part in the Router stage
points to other bamboo nodes as defined in the respective <global>
node_id part. But it has nothing to do with the Gateway stage, right?
The Gateway stage itself runs on a different port and it provides a
different service which allows put/get operations on the DHT overlay.

This confused me a lot in the past as I thought the router's gateway
list refers to the gateway stage mixing up the ports a lot.

Okay, so much for my current understanding. Here are my questions:

1) The clients in my application are all running a local bamboo node.
Therefore, I do not need a seperate RPC call like demonstrated with
GatewayTest in [4]. I'd rather access the DHT directly. But I don't know
how. Any suggestions?

2) Instead of using the Sun RPC, I would like to try out the XML-RPC
protocol which is also included with the sources. The OpenDHT [5] user
guide has examples with some python scripts to access the planetlab
setup via XML-RPC. But I did not manage to use them to access my local
bamboo node at localhost:3632. Is the Gateway stage (running on that
port) capable of accepting both Sun RPC and XML-RPC?
On the mailinglist [6] somebody asked for XML-RPC and was refered to
bamboo/planetlab/openhash.cfg but that config file does not look so much
different from the usual one.

Thanks a lot,
Olaf

[1] http://bamboo-dht.org/users-guide.html
[2] http://bamboo-dht.org/gateway.cfg
[3] http://bamboo-dht.org/second.cfg
[4] http://bamboo-dht.org/faq.html#5
[5] http://www.opendht.org/users-guide.html
[6] http://bamboo-dht.org/pipermail/bamboo-users/2005-June/000339.html