name resolution

[Ken D'Ambrosio]

>> Games used their own broadcasting system (or IPX) to find other 
>> players "in
>> the same room".

IPX was a disaster at scale.  The fact that everything was routed by the 
unique card address (the name of which escapes me, but it was akin to an 
Ethernet card's MAC) meant that each router had to know where *every 
device on every segment* was.  The routing tables went through the roof, 
fast.  Vastly better to use a discovery protocol like... oh, I dunno, 
Bonjour, or other zero-conf variants.  ;-)  I was so happy when I got to 
turn down IPX on our network; running multi-protocol on DOS and Windows 
3.x stacks had been a bit of a nightmare.  (Anyone remember the 
pre-Samba PC/NFS?  Loading drivers into "high" memory?)

I haven't been following this thread, but after reading some of the 
e-mails, I'm afraid, Xen, that I have to back Liam, here.  He knows 
whereof he speaks.

$.02,

-Ken