Re: A comment and question about rendezvous...
Re: A comment and question about rendezvous...
- Subject: Re: A comment and question about rendezvous...
- From: "William Moss" <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 15:57:24 -0500
Have you seen the talk given by Stuart Cheshire at either WWDC in April or
at the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference in October? It may clear up a lot of
questions about Rendevous. Rendevous is actually the marketing name for a
bunch of technologies. Mr. Cheshire makes it clear that they have looked
long and hard at older technologies and their failures. (The WWDC one is
available online to Apple Developers, slides of the O'Reilly presentation
are available somewhere on macdev).
The broadcast algorithm tapers off notifications exponentially to a rate
of 1 packet per hour unless there is a response. So when a new device
comes on the network, it announces itself with a broadcast packet. It
waits. Sends another packet. Waits longer, etc. In total over the chatty
first hour only tosses about 10 packets onto the network. Some network
engineers don't like any traffic on their networks so even this seems
extravagant, but when compared to NetBUI or AppleTalk it seems frugal.
Once they see the restrained use of broadcast traffic and that routers can
be configured to block Rendevous packets from going across subnets,
security becomes the bigger concern to most network guys I've heard.
Security through obscurity is still a major policy in a lot of places and
having difficult to configure lans is also job security for the network
admin. Naturally a technology that simplifies configuration sets off a lot
of warning bells.
There are some places that Rendevous just doesn't make sense. I know that
I will disable Rendevous on my credit card server machine since no one
should be "discovering" it or its services even over the private LAN. But
I think the small security tradeoffs and small network traffic can be
justified by the amount it simplifies configuration and service discovery.
I think though, that the big corporate intranets will not be first on the
bandwagon to support these technologies. I think it's going to be the
small office LANs for people trying to share printers and (ironically)
game developers who want to leverage Rendevous to simplify game setup and
discovery.
William
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