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Commons JCS™

Lateral UDP Discovery

Rather than list all the other lateral servers in the configuration file, you can configure the TCP lateral to use UDP discovery. In discovery mode, lateral TCP caches will broadcast to a multicast address and port, letting all listeners know where they are.

On startup each lateral will issue a special message requesting a broadcast from the other caches. Normal broadcasts occur every 15 seconds. (This is to be made configurable.) Regions that don't receive, are running in send only mode, don't broadcast anything but requests.

The normal broadcasts publish the address and port of the service. This can be configured as TcpListenerHost and TcpListenerPort, respectively. If the service address is not set, the service tries to detect a suitable address using the same interface as the one that is used for multicast. If the multicast uses IPv6, a link-local IPv6 address is selected if one exists. Otherwise, a site-local IPv4 address is chosen. If that attempt also fails, the first address on any non-loopback interface is used.

When a lateral receives a discovery message it will try to add the lateral to the nowait facade for the region. If it already exists nothing happens. If a region is not configured to send laterally, nothing happens, since it doesn't have a no wait.

This allows you to have the same configuration on every machine.

Configuration

The configuration is fairly straightforward and is done in the auxiliary cache section of the cache.ccf configuration file. In the example below, a TCP Lateral Auxiliary Cache referenced by LTCP is created. It uses UDP Discovery to locate other servers. It broadcasts to multicast address 228.5.6.8 and port 6780. It listens to port 1110. The UDP datagram time-to-live is 4 hops.

jcs.auxiliary.LTCP=org.apache.commons.jcs3.auxiliary.lateral.socket.tcp.LateralTCPCacheFactory
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes=org.apache.commons.jcs3.auxiliary.lateral.socket.tcp.TCPLateralCacheAttributes
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.TcpListenerPort=1110
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.PutOnlyMode=true
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.UdpDiscoveryAddr=228.5.6.8
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.UdpDiscoveryPort=6780
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.UdpDiscoveryEnabled=true
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.UdpTTL=4
        

Multi-homed hosts

On machines that have several network interfaces, it might be desirable to fix the interface that is used for multicast. For this purpose, the network interface can be specified in the configuration (see below).

If the network interface is not specified, JCS tries to detect a suitable interface. The selected interface is logged on INFO level. Search for the message "Using network interface" in your log file.

jcs.auxiliary.LTCP=org.apache.commons.jcs3.auxiliary.lateral.socket.tcp.LateralTCPCacheFactory
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes=org.apache.commons.jcs3.auxiliary.lateral.socket.tcp.TCPLateralCacheAttributes
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.TcpListenerPort=1110
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.PutOnlyMode=true
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.UdpDiscoveryInterface=en0
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.UdpDiscoveryAddr=228.5.6.8
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.UdpDiscoveryPort=6780
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.UdpDiscoveryEnabled=true
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.UdpTTL=4