[Bro] About IDs in MutableVals

[Robin Sommer]

On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 14:27 +0000, Christian Kreibich wrote:

> Why is this global namespacing done?

It's for synchronizing values across multiple Bro's.

Let's say we have a table of type "table[count] of some_record". If
two Bros are synchronizing this table across them, they are supposed
to always see the same table content. In particular, if Bro A
modifies a field of some of the records, the change has to appear in
the table of Bro B. That means that Bro A has to propagate the
information "change field x of this record" to Bro B. But for this,
we need a name for "this record" on which both sides agree. That's
where the global namespace is needed. You can see these names as
something like pointers which are globally valid. (In this simple
case, we could have used the table's index as the record's name, but
that doesn't work anymore if aliasing is involved; e.g., the same
record instance is contained in more than one table).

Hope this helps,

Robin

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