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To: cs551@merlot.usc.edu
Subject: Re: Soft restart
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:46:21 -0700
From: Bill Cheng <william@bourbon.usc.edu>

Someone wrote:

  > We have got the responses from the beacons for the non-beacon nodes and we
  > store them in an init_neighbor_list file.
  > 
  > The next step is that the non-beacon nodes do a 'soft restart' , come up,
  > read the ini_neighbor_list file and send hello messages to the beacon nodes.
  > Is this correct ?

Yes.


  > Also, what exactly does a node do in a soft restart ?

The idea is that you should write your code such that when
you do a soft restart, it should be *exactly* like the case
where you do a shutdown and then start your node again.

So, I would so something like the following in main():

    int main(...)
    {
        shutdown = FALSE;
        while (!shutdown) {
            Init(); /* initialize everything except for the shutdown variable */
            DoEverything();
            CleanUp(); /* clean up everything */
        }
    }

The only thing that set shutdown to TRUE if when the
user types "shutdown" or when auto-shutdown happens.
You can also have additional conditions where you set
shutdown to be TRUE.  Otherwise, you node should loop
over and over again.
--
Bill Cheng // bill.cheng@usc.edu <URL:http://merlot.usc.edu/william/usc/>