Namespace Caching

["Eric S. Crawley" <Crawley%alderaan.scrc.symbolics.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

    Date: Fri, 3 Feb 89 09:02 PST
    From: York@Chuck-Jones.ILA-West.Dialnet.Symbolics.COM (William M. York)

	Date: Thu, 2 Feb 89 18:18 EST
	From: Crawley@ALDERAAN.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (Eric S. Crawley)

	    Date: Thu, 2 Feb 89 14:15:01 PST
	    From: saus@venera.isi.edu (Mark Sausville)

	    How many times has it happened?  You need a host in your namespace.
	    The guy with the nameserver puts it in the namespace.  Your machine,
	    since it already asked the nameserver without success, decides that it
	    need never ask again.

	:Reset Network is simple and usually does the trick.  If you want to
	always check with the namespace server for everything, you could set
	neti:*validate-once-per-boot* to nil.  This is set to T by default.

    For small sites, setting this flag to NIL may simplify life by making
    sure that all hosts always have the most up-to-date namespace info.
    For large sites, the potential burden on the namespace server (and the
    time spent by all the other hosts waiting for validity checks) argues
    for a setting of T.

Correct.

	A less drastic method would be to do
	(neti:reset-all-host-availabilities) to make the namespace server
	available if it had been inaccessible followed by
	(neti:reset-all-namespace-access-paths) to reset any cached paths to the
	namespace server.  This should reset things enough that :Show Namespace
	Object should be able to find the object.

    Actually, Show Namespace Object does an explicit :check-validity first
    (unless you tell it not to), so simply doing a Show Namespace Object of
    the new host is enough to get the most recent information.  Right?

    Similarly, you could evaluate:

    (send (net:find-object-named :host "foobar") :check-validity nil t)

    to get the latest info from the namespace server.

This normally works.  However, if you were unable to access the
namespace server previously, the availability mechanism may have marked
the namespace server as unavailable so it would not bother trying to
contact it when doing the :check-validity.  This is when
reset-all-host-availabilities and reset-all-namespace-access-paths
are effective.