Dynamic configuration of a running Erlang/OTP application

[Doug Fort, Consulting Programmer]

Hi,

At SpiderOak, we have an application that involves clusters of 10
nodes passing data files to each other.

Currently, if a node discovers that a peer is down (net_adm:ping
returns pang), it stops sending to all peers. If one node is down, the
cluster is down.

We propose to enable the sysadmins to notify nodes that one of their
peers is down and to give an alternate destination for the missing
peer.

Our current plan is to have a forwarding.conf file that the admins can
scp to nodes in a cluster. The application will periodically poll this
file for changes in the forwarding rules.

In the OTP world of applications that never shut down, others must
have encountered this requirement. How can you change the
configuration of a running process? (In an elegant way). We're looking
for something that unix admins are comfortable with.
-- 
Doug Fort, Consulting Programmer
http://www.dougfort.com