Rendezvous, Microsoft And Apple 484
serendigital writes "MacCentral reports that a BusinessWeek article entitled: 'A Rendezvous with Redmond?' has -- with Rendezvous -- created an actual threat to Microsoft. As reported by MacCentral, it's interesting to note that BusinesWeek's 'Byte of the Apple' columnist Charles Haddad is on temporary leave and this article was written by a substitute columnist."
One more reason I am considering getting a Mac (Score:5, Insightful)
Spend Valentine's Day downloading Windows drivers (Score:5, Funny)
Re:One more reason I am considering getting a Mac (Score:5, Interesting)
Worst quote ever in the Apple Section (Score:5, Funny)
That's what she said.
I can't believe I actually posted this. Wait...Yeah, I can.
On leave? Good (Score:3, Insightful)
WHY is this interesting to note?? Charles Haddad is nothing but an apple apologist, a real zealot. Have you read his previous articles? They are all sugar-coated for Apple. He runs the Apple column at that site, so this is to be expected of course, but I prefer more objectivity.
Frying Pan; Fire (Score:4, Funny)
from the article:
This is the kind of subjectivity that has no place in real journalism. Zealots are Apple's real threat. So many people hear "Apple" and think "using a Powerbook at a Starbucks, sipping a latte, dressed in black." Apple users are art-fags to them, and derogatory comments about "Windoze" aren't going to do anything but make it worse.
How about some fucking objectivity? Lemmie give you a tip, Sparky - people will take you more seriously when you say "Apple's new technology poses a real threat to MS" if you don't follow it with "I'm getting a sex change so I could maybe have Steve's baby"
Re:Frying Pan; Fire (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple's desktops are the sleekest or sexiest, but unless you home build you own whacked case with neon and shit, x86 desktops look like crap too.
So I think his "Bill's boxes to Steve's elegant machines" hits the nail on the head. I still love my Linux boxen, but my Macs, for overall design and availibility of all the software I need, are better.
Re:Frying Pan; Fire (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, there is nothing stoping you from running Linux on your Tibook, you know.
Re:Frying Pan; Fire (Score:5, Interesting)
I can also pretty much put in any kind of memory I want, so long as it complies with the expected stats:
168 Pin PC100 SDRAM DIMM
Changing modems and NICs are easy on Macs too, assuming you're just putting them in the PCI slot. You just have to make sure you have a driver for them. It is true that sometimes Mac drivers do not exist for the cards, but as I understand this is also true in *nix. Sound cards aren't as easy to change but I have never in my 10+ years of using computers felt a need to change mine.
The reason I prefer Macs is...surprise, surprise! The ease of Hardware configuartion! I have used PCs for many things over the years, and consistently found that setting up new hardware can be difficult on PCs whereas it is generally a breeze on the Mac.
Honestly, it really is just familiarity that drives my preference. If I had been raised on Windows, no doubt I would use that instead.
However, I think that it's wrong to say that the appearance of a computer should have no say in your preference.
When I get my next car, my #1 priority is that it be a nice shade of blue. I really don't have any major preference beyond that, so long as it looks good, gets decent mileage and is fairly dependable. These days, a lot of cars fit that bill, but if it ain't blue, I ain't buying it. Is it a stupid criteria? Maybe. But it's a criteria nonetheless. A lot of people tie up their identity in their "look", and their computer might fall under that too.
If you were buying some piece of shit computer that looked pretty, then I'd agree that it was a stupid decision. But Apple computers aren't pieces of shit.
Re:Frying Pan; Fire (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Frying Pan; Fire (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously.
but from what I know it's all propriety apple stuff
Then you don't know anything. No offense.
DDR RAM, IDE HDD (on a *gasp* ATA bus), AGP Video-cards, PCI expansion slots, USB, IEEE 1493 (Firewire, iLink), ZIF processors.... in every powermac sold today (and has been sold for a while).
In fact, my Powermac has a Seagate HDD, a nVidia videocard and shikatronics RAM.
I thought that this kind ignorance had disappeared, but I guess not.
Re:Frying Pan; Fire (Score:5, Informative)
It almost drove them out of business.
No, Apple's doing exactly what they should, and they're being extremely successful with it.
The thing is, the style of their machines is one of the selling points - it resonates with the art crowd, as well as the very rich, as well as the "I'm totally computer-illiterate and I don't care" crowd who just wants a machine that works. Their hardware isn't cycle-for-cycle competitive with x86 machines, so putting it in ugly boxes and charging less would kill them. End of story.
Take a look at their history sometime. Interesting stuff.
Re:Frying Pan; Fire (Score:3, Funny)
When did quotation marks become horribly-biased-paraphrase-marks? Was it about the same time that you said "I'm a pedophile"?
Interesting because... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the point. It's not written by the guy who is known to be a real zealot.
BW's "Byte of the Apple" column (Score:3, Informative)
Re:On leave? Good (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a big Mac apologist, but may I ask what meaningful things are harder to do on a Mac than on Windows? It can't be using Microsoft Office documents, because there is an official Microsoft Office for MacOS, even OSX. That is the thing most people seem to complain about with other non-Windows OSes. So what are you talking about "anything meaningful" is awfully open ended.
Re:On leave? Good (Score:4, Funny)
Re:On leave? Good (Score:3, Interesting)
There are solutions to this, of course. For instance if you are printing to printers on a PC network, I'd advise getting GimpPrint. It takes a lot of Linux printer drivers for GIMP, adds some nice UI, and makes them general OSX drivers. (The underlying CUPS printing system is very nice - its just that printer dirvers often are woefully underpowered in their native OSX forms)
GimpPrint [macupdate.com]
The other solution to accessing a Windows network with a Mac is the "write it down solution." Hardly ideal, although to be fair, something Linux users also typically end up doing. There are some freeware/shareware solutions that provide browsers. Not all of them work equally though. (i.e. they don't really solve the underlying issues) The following is one that many people like. (I personally only have a few shares and thus only need to set them up once, after which "who cares?"
SMB Browse [macupdate.com]
My point isn't that this is a huge problem. (It isn't) But it is something that is vastly easier in XP than in OSX. Further many "less tech savvy" individuals will have problem hooking their Mac to their PC network. Hopefully Apple will resolve this in 10.3. (Certainly they need to seriously revamp the Finder due to its lack of multithreading and poor FTP support along with the SMB problems)
Re:On leave? Good (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe your problem has to with the way your network is configured (I'd check out your WINS server as a hunch). OS X is using Samba. If you want to figure out why you can't browse, try checking the Samba page (or do a Google search).
Just because it doesn't work for you doesn't mean that it doesn't work.
Re:On leave? Good (Score:5, Informative)
Re:On leave? Good (Score:3, Informative)
In 10.2, Connect to Server will list Windows workgroups and machines.
At least, it does on my machine. Try clicking the down arrow to the right of the At popup?
Re:On leave? Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Breathe Air - You could suck down the power supply exhaust, but that doesn't really count. You can however check to see if you can breathe [weather.com] when you go outside.
Sex - Technology has not advanced that far yet, but I've had good luck meeting new people online, then meeting up with them in person.
Ride a bicycle - Buy parts, plan routes, get maps, etc..
Walk through the woods - here [ofdoom.com] you go - it's a QTVR I made a couple of years ago of a walk along a creek to the river it joins up with. All kidding aside, this one probably can have the most computer involvement. After all, you want to get topographic maps somewhere [topozone.com], and maybe check out an overhead view [acme.com] of the area you plan on walking through, not to mention sharing [ofdoom.com] details of where you went with friends.
Re:On leave? Good (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Because the man is a moron. (Score:3, Insightful)
Case in point. He shouldn't HAVE TO.
Re:Because the man is a moron. (Score:3, Funny)
Shit, lets just drop the IP layer altogether, cause all we need to do is write down the MAC address of each networking componant in the office and manually enter them anytime we do anything!
Brilliant!
This article is not readable. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This article is not readable. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This article is not readable. (Score:3, Insightful)
Question: which is the biggest proprietary software vendor for Apple machines?
Well, which is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
VOIP (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:VOIP (Score:5, Funny)
Re:VOIP (Score:5, Funny)
you mean like a modem?
Nothing really new... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nothing really new... (Score:5, Informative)
If these Apple press release are anything to go by, then Rendezvous has already made huge headway:
-
TiVo, Brother & Aspyr Announce Rendezvous Networked Products [apple.com]
- Developers Rapidly Adopt Apple's Rendezvous Networking Technology [apple.com]
- Epson, HP & Lexmark Support Apple's Rendezvous Technology [apple.com]
Although already posted in further down, here is Apple's page on Rendezvous [apple.com]. I want to see this technology work, because simplicity is what most people want. If its simple, then people just use the technology and don't notice its there - this is what future computing must strive to do.This is sad (Score:5, Interesting)
Food for thought, when ever I converse with the people who do a great job and run they're IT department efficiently, and Apple/Macintosh is part of the conversation, they have no problem with it. I quote in a conversation just last Friday, "in our company we do what ever it takes to get the job done in the most efficient and effective way, at this time Mac's are not part of our makeup, but if that's the direction we need to go in the future, then we will. I am loyal to my company, not Microsoft and certainly not Dell.
Re:Please Don't (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple solutions aren't always going to be the best. I'm not claiming that. I'd even go so far as to say that sometimes, using MS stuff is the right thing for a company or project, despite the fact that I detest their business practices (and think they've earned every bit of antipathy they've received). But the bottom line is: there's a world of I/T and software workers out there who'll never even consider (let alone attempt to become proficient with) technologies outside their favorites, and that's simply not professional. No company or platform out there holds a monopoly on good ideas.
Re:This is sad (Score:3, Interesting)
And it works for games, too (Score:5, Interesting)
I was pleasantly surprised when I noticed that "Pop-pop" is rendezvous-enabled. No need to "host" a game -- you just see each other, double-click to request a game.
What is interesting is that even though "normal host a game over IP" stuff still works, and is dead-easy to config, rendezvous seems to be relatively easy to drop into an app.
I was skeptical at first, but now I'm curious to see what neato things people will start to implement using rendezvous.
Re:And it works for games, too (Score:5, Funny)
Security? (Score:3, Insightful)
Rendezvous: The Security Answer (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Security? (Score:4, Insightful)
Correct me if I am wrong.
Re:Security? (Score:3)
all service location does is make weak points easier to find. But you'd be mad to export such discovery protocols beyond the firewall. Madder things have happened...what is the RV request for 'all machines with SQL server on port 1434?'
Re:Security? (Score:4, Insightful)
A protocol like Rendezvous is not passive. It must broadcast queries and respond to broadcast queries for this type of system to work. that goes beyond firewall and obscurity concerns. The responses to those queries must be sufficiently validated so they can't cause problems in the network. Someone could create an intentionally malicious reply that indicates the presents of certain devices that are not really there. Your machine then interfaces with that device with a certain amount of trust. If it is really a trojan on the network, how do you know? A few well times "transmission errors" or inconsistant resource replies can turn into DOS across the board.
Active discovery has to take a lot more risks than simply hunkering down behind a firewall. It must place a certain amount of "Trust but Verify" on its surroundings. You aren't always behind a company firewall. Sometimes you are sitting in the airport waiting for a flight and checking your email through the local wireless hub.
And since this is all supposed to be zero-admin, just how much hands on configuration and oversite do you think the user should be put through?
Re:Security? (Score:4, Insightful)
People didn't have or know too much about Telnet, so default services and configs of servers wern't too "locked down" out of the box.
Fast forward, and distros and OSes are becoming increasingly locked down out of the box. Nobody who will eventually make money as a web host is letting you connect to their servers with anything less than SSH.
What many people fail to realize is that an increase in the ease with which we can 'discover' possible points of entry and visibility of services (affected by both changes in technology and increased unbiquity of access clients) results in a hightened awareness of security and generally more secure out of the box configs.
The funniest part is how many insecure WAP networks are out there
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water here
Sweet!!! (Score:5, Funny)
AWESOME!!!
-H. Rosen
Re:Sweet!!! (Score:4, Funny)
I checked your website [epyon-industries.ath.cx] to see what kind of person we're dealing with, too. "At this site, you will discover all about our ability to help you build your corporate network, as well as our courteous and resourceful staff." We will discover all about your ability? Your resourceful staff should find a good grammar resource. And then there's the line at the bottom - "if you don't hire us, your stock holders will know." Whoever came up with that line should not be allowed to speak in public.
ZeroConf on Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, what exactly are the security implications? Obviously there are certain things you don't want to broadcast to just anybody! Rendezvous could make wardriving even easier...
Re:ZeroConf on Linux? / Rendezvous is Open Source (Score:3, Informative)
Nick Powers
Re:ZeroConf on Linux? (Score:4, Informative)
Remember that Rendezvous is really a packaging of three separate protocols, not just zeroconf. So full Rendezvous support in Linux requires more porting work.
Tittillating tech titans touch together! (Score:4, Funny)
Could the Belle of Cupertino and the Stud of Redmond be the hottest new couple on the Siliconwood stage? That's what this gossip reporter tried to find out this week, but alas there was little 411 to be found as intimate confidantes of both parties were tight lipped and mum!
Apple and Microsoft we heard to be discussing a "rendezvous" of some sort. Could it be merely a business deal, or a romantic entanglement? Une telle excitation!
Only time will tell, sassy tech fans! Maybe Microsoft can only tell us how Apple signs a contract. But if the stars favor romance as Valentine's Day (every geek's FAVORITE holiday!) approaches, perhaps Microsoft will learn if Apple cries out or sighs softly or squeals like a pig as she, well, consummates the deal, if you know what I mean.
And I know you know, you naughty voyeurs! ;-) Une fessée sur le fond pour vous!
Rendevous A Redmond Killer Does Not Make (Score:5, Insightful)
why?
because its open source...
Ironicly this is in redmond favor.... since if they ever see it as a threat to themselves due to their lack of such a feature, they'll simply incorporate it... And with that the advantage apple had over MS is gone.
With the major printers on board amongst others begining to support it.... I highly doubt it will take Bill long to make sure MS also supports it AND adds their own special "windows enhanced" features to it.
This whole situation is anologous to when apple made the USB only imac.... in a time when USB was common, but USB products weren't.... Apple suddenly created a greatly under-supported market.... which suddenly rushed to fill the whole with plethras of USB devices.... that didn't even take a year to become predominatly PC.
--Enter The Sig --
Windows killer, explained (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why MS got all fired up about stomping Netscape into the ground, because the browser is supposed to enable platform-independent computing.
Yeah, it's kind of a stretch to think of Rendezvous as a "Windows killer," but it's just one technology of many to accomplish that task.
The writer is on crack (Score:5, Interesting)
The first thing Apple shipped using rendez-vous was iChat. The iTunes demo refered to has yet to ship. (you can get the same fuctionnality using iCommune though).
Then, it's not that magical. It only works on one subnet, no way to manually add hosts to the resolver (at least not without serious hacking).
What's the deal with Safari helping you change your printer config? IF your printer advertises itself as a web serveur via Rendez-vous, AND you ask safari to display Rendez-vous-discovered bookmarks, then yes, you can directly access the printer's config pages. But the article does not make this clear at all. And this is different from auto-discovering printers, which I have yet to test since the old HPs we use are still go for a couple hundred thousand pages.
The wild guesses about distributed computing are still a pipe dream, Rendez-vous or not.
And at work, somehow, aliases of Rendez-vous-mountedd servers won't resolve after unmounting the server. Aliases made of servers mounted via AFP or Appletalk will resolve and mount the server.
Rendez-vous is cool, but it still has a long way to go before it is as polished (from a user POV) as the old Appletalk system.
Networking for dummies...but (Score:4, Insightful)
Security restrictions? Can I restrict the range of IP addresses that access my music folders? Password access? Encryption? I wanna tweak dammit! The problem with that is that as soon as you make the system more powerful and have all these geek-satisfying options, you need to be able to get down to the nuts and bolts of configuring it. Otherwise you end up in the same mess as MS, with users blindly enabling potentially insecure servers.
Microsoft's response (Score:5, Interesting)
a) Ignore
b) FUD
c) Embrace/extend/destroy
One important question: Does the Apple Public Source License (under which Rendezvous has been released) give Apple the ability to stop Microsoft from embracing/extending/destroying?
End the FUD (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Microsoft's response (Score:5, Funny)
For my own amusement, I took the suggestion of your
Is that what THEY didn't want me to discover?
Two things... (Score:3)
2) Rendevous must be limited to a broadcast subnet. In my work site, subnets kind of snake all through the site due to historical reasons and growth over the years, so the subnet I am on spans two buildings, where across the hall those folks are on a different subnet. I know of a few cube office rooms where people in the same room are on two different subnets. Is there support in cisco routers to forward this traffic between nets? (or maybe that's not a good idea...)
3) ok, i lied. three things. Since when did itunes get ability to pick up other rendevous user playlists? (mentioned in that article). I sure don't see it... Am I missing something?
Re:Two things... (Score:3, Interesting)
Before you flame me, note I now have a Mac in my office and am loving it more each day I use it. Changing the culture in the organization, however, will be tough. I'm a manager, which means I get to decide how to implement policy, but I don't make it. And the current policy is, Macs are not supported nor approved for purchase. In fact, the Mac in my office is one we confiscated from Marketing when the decision was made (not mine) to convert them all to PCs. Their loss, my gain!
We'll see how things shake out for the future. I'm certainly being converted, so much so that I have a 12" G4 PB on order for my personal use.
(could make an interesting switcher story. I, the evil tech support manager, confiscated a Mac from those rebel marketing people, plugged it in, fell in love, kept it for myself, muhahahahha...)
Anyway, sounds like there must be a way in the jet direct cards to name the printer for rendevous purposes.... I'll take a look later, maybe, whenever I find I need to print something out! :)
JetDirect (Score:3, Interesting)
- Open up Print Center
- Click the "Add Printer" button
- Select "AppleTalk" as the protocol
- Select the printer that appeared
Dang! I didn't know that JetDirect cards supported AppleTalk! So the moral there is, somewhere in some obscure technical bulletin (probably, knowing HP) there are instructions for setting the name of the JetDirect card.The really sweet part came a few weeks later when I wanted to print a document from OpenOffice. I had never configured the printer settings within X11, and have never even touched
This contrasts very favorably to the time 8 months ago when I configured my Dell laptop with RedHat 7.3 to print to the LaserJet at home.
How to Re-name that printer (Score:3, Informative)
Alex Salkever is not "a substitute columnist" (Score:4, Informative)
PDF file on Apple (Score:4, Informative)
Rendezvous is (or will be) an Internet Standard (Score:5, Informative)
At the ZeroConf WG meetings I have been to, Microsoft was very much present, so I assume that they are well aware of this technology.
Rendezvous vs. AppleTalk (Score:5, Interesting)
Has Rendezvous really addressed the issue that got AppleTalk locked out of a lot of corporate networks? I wonder how it compares to AT.
Re:Rendezvous vs. AppleTalk (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe the SE dates back to 1987(?), so that wouldn't be too surprising. However, I do know that Apple made significant strides in reducing the chattiness of AppleTalk by the mid- to late-90's. But by that time, most network admins were heavily biased against it.
Interesting Rendezvous Links (Score:3, Informative)
Apple Developer Site Apple Developer Site [apple.com]
SourceForge SourceForge [sourceforge.net]
Strangeberry Java implementation [strangeberry.com]
International University and Sun Microsystems supported a collaborative research program. Java source code [neato.org]
trade shows (Score:3, Insightful)
The trade show wireless network a small local network, the sort Rendezvous works with. Vendors and consultants will be able to promote themselves by having web sites and servers advertise themselves. You'll be able to find FTP or file servers and grab demo versions of products. You'll be able to chat with representatives. You'll be able to grab contact information into your address book and product release calendars into iCal. Who knows what else?
Apple will not grow market share with a PC version (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple does not make money by packaging software and making it available for everyone to use freely. Sure they get to innovate and make their customers happy, but it does not win them more customers. This article seems to imply that creating cool technology and implementing it on a PC will help Apple. There needs to be some proprietary software in place for this to be true.
Now if they created a Rendezvous implementation for corporate environments and a Software Development Kit to be used by companies like IBM. At work I use Lotus Notes which has a messenger client. I would like to automatically find co-workers without all of the initial setup that I had to do when I started using it. I would also like to be able to monitor the servers on the network and use the printers more easily. If Apple could sell software to do all of that, and perhaps sell XServe systems with it I bet that would benefit Apple.
I really hope Apple does break into the corporate workplace. It would really simplify much of extra work that I do so I can get back to my real work.
Re:Apple will not grow market share with a PC vers (Score:4, Informative)
Why is everyone so clueless about this? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm seeing a lot of knee-jerk reactions about Rendezvous and security. People are assuming that because the protocol is about making certain types of network configuration dynamic and simple, it is necessarily insecure. Well, I've got news for you: any type of connection from one computer to another is creating security issues. I mean...duh. Now, clearly using something like the zeroconf protocol is going to require stuff like...passwords and encryption and all the usual nonsense we need to make things secure. Oh, and a competent sysadmin administrating the system. So can we cool it with the frothing?
Now, if someone had some good comments on the security issues involved with the zeroconf protocol [zeroconf.org] itself, I'd like to read about it [cisco.com].
Rendezvous ROCKS (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, they just launch iChat when they log in in the morning, and boom-- instant, zero-config buddy list of everyone in the department. Need to ask someone a question? No more hollering over cubes or using the phone, a quick IM does the trick. Need to send someone a file? No more e-mailing or putting it on the server for the person who needs it. Drag it and drop it onto their name in the buddy list, and they'll get a dialog, "Person wants to send you file filename, do you wish to accept?"
The only people who think something like this is a bad thing are the ignorant ones. OF COURSE the devices that use Rendezvous will OFFER security and configurability options-- but the point is, you don't NEED them if all you want to do is get on a network and print to a networked printer. And you don't need to have silly little wizards walk you through the process. Rendezvous is the logical extension of Apple's whole 'it just works' philosophy, and is a wonderful modern incarnation of AppleTalk.
~Philly
Zorkconf! (Score:4, Funny)
*user walks into a room*
Frobozz Magic Smoke Company Lobby
You have entered the lobby of the Frobozz Magic Smoke Company. This building was constructed in the year 1998, by ten thousand slaves working for the Great Underground Empire, to hold the offices of the workers designing and implementing new forms of magic smoke.
> look
You see two broken web terminals, a secured file server, and a print server. One of the secretaries is chatting about how she got her nails done the other day.
*user walks north into the Human Resources department*
Human Resources
The Human Resources department of the Frobozz Magic Smoke Company is widely considered to be the cruelest, most inhuman lot of soulless minions ever to serve the will of evil.
> look
You see two printers, a Sybase server, a Graphite G4, a speed-hole G4, and a voicephone.
> look G4
Do you mean the Graphite G4 or the speed-hole G4?
> graphite
The Graphite G4 is sharing two directories, marked 'music' and 'porn', and has 82% CPU free.
The potential is amazing! Go Apple!
--Dan
Re:Let them fight among themselves (Score:4, Informative)
I wonder what that source download is.
Or mod_rendezvous for Apache.
Or the CVS access.
Re:Let them fight among themselves (Score:5, Informative)
Rendez-Vous is based on Zero-Config, an open-sourced standard.
Apple merely enhenced it a bit and wrote some high-level APIs for even speedier development. But it's just Zero-Config. Rendez-Vous sources are available as all Darwin source code at Darwin.org [apple.com].
Re:'Bill's Boxes' and 'Steve's Elegant Machines'. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:'Bill's Boxes' and 'Steve's Elegant Machines'. (Score:5, Informative)
What that means is that Rendevous need not worry so much about security, instead security will be left up to the other pieces, maybe something like secure dns [is.co.za]. Much like http was later secured by wrapping it with SSL, telnet evolved into SSH, Rendevous can be secured with other mechanisms.
Re:'Bill's Boxes' and 'Steve's Elegant Machines'. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it doesn't. Rendezvous is made of two parts: multicast DNS and service announcement. Multicast DNS works without a DNS server at all. My computer sends out a multicast packet that all Rendezvous-enabled machines are listening for. That packet says, "Who's snowball.local?" The machine named snowball responds, "I'm snowball.local, and my IP is x.x.x.x." That way, two hosts on an IP segment can communicate by name without a DNS server.
No dynamic DNS involved.
And because Rendezvous is not, in and of itself, a service, but rather a system for locating running services, security just isn't a concern. The various running services are responsible for implementing whatever security is appropriate, and if you don't want a service advertised, just turn off Rendezvous for that service.
Re:'Bill's Boxes' and 'Steve's Elegant Machines'. (Score:5, Insightful)
Rondevous (Score:4, Funny)
Re:'Bill's Boxes' and 'Steve's Elegant Machines'. (Score:4, Funny)
Heh. Or they could just download [apple.com] the source code and use that.
Re:'Bill's Boxes' and 'Steve's Elegant Machines'. (Score:5, Informative)
Rendevous is a protocol, not an application. It just provides autodiscovery of available services on a single subnet. For example, someone created a Rendezvous module for Apache which allows Macs running Safari to automatically see that the server is there. Does that make Apache less secure? Security is up to the individual services to provide.
Rendezvous is Apple's name for the IETF standard "zeroconf". Nobody has implemented it on Linux yet, but I'm sure people are working on it.
Re:'Bill's Boxes' and 'Steve's Elegant Machines'. (Score:4, Informative)
If it's your imagination, it is mine too. I work for a company that makes application level firewalls for web servers ( Teros [teros.com] ), and we make our living off of insecurities in networks and networked software. This sounds like something our marketing guys are gonna love. <wry grin>
Apple has posted a technical brief on Rendezvous [apple.com] on their web site. I grabbed a copy, and will read it later when I have the time.
Personally, I'm going to want a whole lot more details about Rendevous, and testing of it, before I'd consider enabling it on any computer I owned, though. And I'm seriously considering a switch to the Mac platform when I buy my next personal laptop.
Re:'Bill's Boxes' and 'Steve's Elegant Machines'. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:simple != insecure (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where is Open Source Rendezvous? (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention you can get the "real" rendezvous source here [apple.com] from Apple.
Re:scarey (Score:5, Informative)
It's not automatic sharing, it's automatic discovery. Rendezvous will tell you that there's a machine providing a particular service on your LAN, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll be able to gain access to it.
Re:Home usage only (Score:5, Informative)
Although wireless networks offer slower bandwidth than their wired counterparts, they do offer one advantage over hard-connected ethernet: they don't suffer from the same saturation problems. While 100 demanding users could quickly saturate a shared 100 MB/S wire, the same users on wireless will not interfere with eachother. Wireless scales much better than you seem to think.
Secondly, a couple hunderd extra broadcast packets aren't going to saturate a 100 base-t network. A packet is tiny. If I do a tcpdump right now, you wouldn't believe the number of broadcast packets flying around here at this moment. My network connnection isn't being adversely affected.
Also, I'd really differ with you that Rendezvous isn't useful in a business setting. Obviously it's not going to replace DNS for the majority of services, but it could seriously simplfy things like, printing, scanning, and maybe even some file sharing. I don't doubt that this technology will find a great place in the home, but it certainly doesn't mean it's useless to businesses. It's worth noting though that Rendezvous is limited to the current machine's local subnet.
Re:Home usage only (Score:3, Interesting)
But, the IETF work on Service Location Protocol does scale beyond a subnet, and once you add an (optional) SLP directory service, clients stop multicasting, only the dir service multicasts to advertise its existence; everything just talks straight to the service.
Where all these device discovery protocols fail on the office LAN is there is no point knowing there are 15 printers within two datagram hops, you want to print to the closest machine, and you dont want to have to install another print driver to do so...
Re:Home usage only (Score:3, Informative)
Vivato uses "packetsteering" (phased array technology) to receive different signals from different directions simultaneously. But existing 802.11b doesn't allocate a seperate 11mbps to each user. In fact, if you have just 1 802.11b user and 1 802.11g user, the 802.11g user will only get like 15-16mbps of throughput.
Final note-- you mean mb/s, not MB/s.
Re:Home usage only (Score:3, Informative)
Each full channel is able to handle 11 Mbps. Since your access point only operates on one channel, your maximum throughput is 11 Mbps, period. Each wireless connection gets a portion of that using DSSS to keep interference between multiple wireless clients down.
Realistically, you get about 6 Mbps per access point. If you try transferring a file between two computers on the same access point, you'll see about 3 Mbps as it is essentially a half-duplex connection.
It scales much better than previous protocols. (Score:5, Informative)
You'd be surprised how well this actually scales. That is one of the whole points. Rendezvous is a replacement to AppleTalk, and as such one of the major goals is not to saturate the network like other more chatty protocols.
For instance, each host implements an aggressive caching scheme so if one host asks for data, other hosts can learn from its request. There is also an exponentially rising delay between each request, the assumption being a host that has been around a long time will continue to be around a long time. Further, Rendezvous requests are not just like broadcast pings. They have a very well defined (and specific) domain standard in multicast DNS. You could ask only for http servers running over TCP, or only iPhoto sharing servers. This cuts down on the traffic.
Of course, the other problem is the dynamic IP address assignment. It chooses an IP out of a /16 subnet. In short, in order for there to be a high probability of collision there need to be more than 32768 hosts, and even then it'll converge quickly. The Zeroconf spec gives upper bounds on how many hosts should be in a zeroconf network.
The whole idea of this system is to allow small isolated subnets (like a wireless zone) to auto-configure. After the first 20,000 devices, sure you might see some degredation in performance. Of course, imagine an admintaking care of a 20,000 device subnet. They end up like a cross between Jerry Lewis and Christopher Lloyd. If you need more subnets then you link them via a configured host. A proxy-gateway with rendezvous, forwarding only things that matter for this subnet, would be a pretty cool app too.
Zeroconf, especially in the home or small office setting, is really, really useful.
Re:It scales much better than previous protocols. (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing that would make scaling RV better would be to route link-local addresses. We discussed trying this, but haven't tried it yet. This would allow for multiple 'RV' networks. In all probability, RV may not be ready for this kind of thing, but I don't know all there is to know about RV yet.
As for security, that always has been and always will be between the application layer and the network layer. Think about it: if your host and/or application is insecure, then it won't matter if you run ZeroConf/RV or not.
Re:Home usage only (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of the technology behind this seems very cool in nature, but just like AppleTalk (which had many similar zeroconf features) i can't imagine it will scale very well. Although this article would love you to think otherwise, I would imagine this whole thing would have more of an effect on the home market then on the buisiness market. I can see not wanting configure applications on small network, but with all of these broadcast packets i would imagine it would saturate a low speed (read:wireless) network.
Actually, ZeroConf contains many provisions for scalability:
Apple has said that they designed ZeroConf to generate significantly less traffic than AppleTalk.
Re:Home usage only (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the reasons why Apple systems became so popular in the 80's was because of this type of technology that they developed (i.e. AppleTalk Name Binding Protocol). A small publishing business could take a few Macs and a LaserWriter and plug them together using simple cabling and magically the printer just appeared in everyone's Chooser. No print servers required, no DNS, no DHCP. It all 'just worked' the way people needed and wanted it to work.
Since then, networks have gotten more pervasive, and the kinds of peripherals available are much greater and more sophisticated than just printers. So Apple learned from their mistakes (e.g. the chattiness of AT), updated for new types of peripherals and networking requirements and essentially developed (with other peer companies) a next generation of AppleTalk NBP, and they call it Rendezvous/ZeroConf.
Microsoft has simililar technology already in SMB. But most would agree that it is very hard to set up without significant technical expertise and of course it is proprietary, among other well documented limitations.
What is so annoying in threads like this is that so many people just make shit up with a predisposed biased perspective because Apple had something to do with it, and assume Apple can't do anything right. And then so many other people just run with the crap. They assume that some idiot made up some stupid protocol and that there was no thought process and no peer review. They never read the docs and talk about real information. They can't imagine that some smart people may have actually come up with a cool idea, thought about the potential issues and tradeoffs, and solved them as best as anyone could. Luckily there are a few people that try to comat the crap, but most just ignore the real information and continue on spouting the crap, because they really just want to bash.
Just wait a year or so. Rendezvous will be ubiquitous. And people will be benefitting from it and wonder how they ever lived without it. Apple will have lead the way, yet again. And Windows and Linux users will benefit from it just as much as Apple users.
Re:i'm sure that M$ is just shakin in their boots. (Score:4, Funny)
Paperclip? That's the most out-of-date trolling I've seen in a while, LOL. Here let me finish for you:
Re:Promiscuous sharing with Rendezvous and Wifi (Score:3, Funny)
And strangers will be following you around as you walk the streets, trying to download the last few megabytes of that Metallica album.
graspee
Re:Rendezvous is Apple's implementation of ZeroCon (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Rendezvous is Apple's implementation of ZeroCon (Score:5, Informative)