On Sunday 10 August 2008, Greg Dunlap wrote:
This whole problem would be much simpler if every "thing" had a GUID. Get that in place, and building a system to do deployment in the way described above actually becomes a realistic proposition.
I hope I am not stating the obvious here, but you can get yourself a pseudo-GUID if you ask the user for a string that identifies the installation (e.g. my-dev, my-staging, my-production) and use that and the object internal id to create a GUID (no hashing necessary). When you import objects INTO an installation you keep a table that maps the remote object GUID to the local object GUID. Then you have a well defined one to one mapping, and you are able to update the object again, reference to it (this comment is for that node), or even send it back if needed. You can also keep track of which object came from where if you ever need this kind of auditing. I don't trust arbitrary strings like domain, IP, MAC etc as they have the tendency to change. Asking the user for a unique id (and it only has to be unique in his world) should be good enough here. -- Yuval Hager [@] yuval@avramzon.net