I am confused on the way Handles work. Let me explain by way of an example.
I have a prefix, for the sake of argument 98765. I have created a handle 98765/todo that points to the URL http://shield.mydomain.org/todo.txt. If I look at the handle in the Admin tool it shows a data value of the URL.
But, what happens if at some point in the future, the name of the host changes from shield.coalliance.org to dagger.mydomain.org? That handle is now broken, correct?
I thought the whole point of Handles was to create a way to be able to find information regardless of changes such as I described.
The way I envisioned the Handle service working is more like this:
98765 would actually resolve to http://shield.mydomain.org, therefore handles I create would only include the final destination at that location (todo.txt in my example above). So, the Handle 98765/todo would equal http://shield.mydomain.org/todo.txt. Then, if I later changed shield to dagger, I would have to update my siteinfo with the Global Registry, telling it that all 98765 prefixes now belong to dagger.mydomain.org.
The way it appears to actually work to me is:
The 98765 prefix is simply used by the Global Registry to tell the proxy server which local handle server it should look to to resolve. So, the proxy server looks up 98765 and knows to send the request to my local server at IP 192.168.0.1. The local server then says "todo" is equal to the URL and redirects the users browser to that URL hard coded into the handle.
I have tested this by creating a Handle with the URL of todo.txt, no domain info included. When I attempt to resolve it I get an error that it cannot be found.
I'm sure this isn't making much sense but I am having a hard time wrapping my brain around these concepts.
Thanks in advance.
Tim Donnelly
Systems/Network Administrator
Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries
(303)759-3399 x106