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To: cs551@merlot.usc.edu
Subject: Re: Regarding connection establishment
Date: Sun, 05 Oct 2008 08:11:25 -0700
From: Bill Cheng <william@bourbon.usc.edu>

Someone wrote:

  > When a beacon node starts up, it first tries to establish a connection
  > with each of the other beacon nodes. So we should create one socket
  > descriptor for each connection right ?

Correct.

  > Something like an array of sockfds ?

Try not to use arrays!

In warmup #2, you needed to implement Q1.  I was hoping
that you implementated it using a list of some sort.
For the final project, you need queues like this all over
the place.  I'm hoping that you will use lists for all
these.  Then you can use the same list to keep track of
all your connections (with beacon or non-beacon nodes).
When a non-beacon node decides that one of the beacon nodes
is its neighbor, it will also make a connection to one of
your beacon nodes.

Of course, you can use an array to implement a queue if
you call realloc().  Please just make sure that you don't
use a fixed size array!
--
Bill Cheng // bill.cheng@usc.edu <URL:http://merlot.usc.edu/william/usc/>