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Rendezvous Developer Stuart Cheshire Interviewed
overunderunderdone writes "Found this interview of Stuart Cheshire, the Apple employee who developed Rendezvous (a.k.a. Zeroconf) and co-chairs the ZEROCONF working group. He provides some interesting history behind Zeroconf. But I thought his ideas for the future of Rendezvous was more interesting. He envisions a single protocol for everything from the keyboard, hard disk, peripherals, to the net connection -- just one kind of socket in the back of your box."
wow ! I didn't know that stuart works at Apple now !
He's the famous author of the ancient bolo game and corresponding cult. Probably died out by now, but I wasted a good part of my eyes and brain on bolo many years ago
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
I got some strange error... But hit back arrow and the article came up..
here it is:
On Rendezvous, TiVo, and Parliamentary Titles
An Exclusive Interview with Stuart Cheshire
Wizard Without Portfolio at Apple Computer & Chairman of IETF ZEROCONF
Soon after publishing my article entitled Rendezvous: It's Like a Backstage Pass to the Future, an e-mail appeared in my Inbox from some guy named Stuart
who was very supportive and helped me gain further understanding of a few aspects of the Rendezvous technology. It wasn't until I got to the bottom of
his e-mail when I noticed his signature. Ha! No wonder he knew so much about Rendezvous - he was Chairman of the ZEROCONF Working Group and was
employed at Apple! After exchanging a couple of e-mails back and forth, I asked him if I could interview him during Macworld, and to my delight, he agreed.
Stuart has been involved in a slew of computer science projects for the past number of years. He recently completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at
Stanford University, and holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, U.K. You can learn more about his background from his
Web site. One of his overriding goals is to make IP networking easier to manage and better suited for use with various kinds of computing devices, which is
why he has been so instrumental in getting IETF ZEROCONF off the ground.
Jared: Thanks very much for agreeing to this interview in spite of your busy schedule and travel arrangements. You're actually in Japan at the moment, correct?
Stuart: That's right. I'm in Japan for the week-long IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) meeting. The IETF does most of its work via email, but three times a year we get together
for face-to-face discussion. Generally two out of three meetings are in the United States, but the Internet is a worldwide phenomenon, not just an American thing, so usually at least
one meeting a year is outside the USA.
At this minute I'm sitting in the IPv6 Working Group meeting with my PowerBook, answering your questions via AirPort.
Very cool! Now the ZEROCONF Working Group that is part of the IETF is responsible for developing and maintaining the open-standard Zeroconf networking protocols,
dubbed Rendezvous by Apple. Can you give us a brief overview of these protocols and the history behind them?
The initial seeds of Zeroconf started in a Macintosh network programmers' mailing list called net-thinkers, back in 1997 when I was still a PhD student at Stanford. We were
discussing the poor state of ease-of-use for IP networking, particularly the lack of any equivalent to the old AppleTalk Chooser for browsing for services. I proposed that part of the
solution might be simply to layer the existing AppleTalk Name Binding Protocol (NBP) over UDP Multicast.
At the Orlando IETF meeting in December 1998 I discussed this idea with other people, and the following suggestion was made: trying to introduce an AppleTalk protocol into the
IETF would not be easily accepted, but perhaps the existing IETF DNS packet format is semantically rich enough to hold exactly the same information as I proposed putting into an
NBP/IP packet. I agreed with this suggestion - there's no need to invent a new IETF packet format just for the sake of it, if there's an existing packet format that can do the job
perfectly well.
The IETF is generally populated by people who care very little for ease-of-use, but the Area Directors of the Internet Area were sufficiently far-sighted that they believed that
improving ease-of-use should be an important priority for the IETF, even though that was very much a minority view back than. Even today, it remains a something of a minority
view in the IETF. Most IETF people work for router vendors, ISPs, backbone providers, telephone companies, etc., and their focus is wide-area networking. If you work for a
company that makes routers, you've not going to be very excited about technology that lets computers communicate directly, without needing a router. If you work for a company
that sells a DHCP server, you've not going to be very excited about technology that lets computers communicate without needing a DHCP server. If you work for a company that
sells DNS servers, you've not going to be very excited about technology that lets computers communicate without needing a DNS server. I'm sure you get the point.
Despite this lack of general enthusiasm, the Area Directors went ahead and arranged a preliminary "Birds of a Feather" session (BOF) to discuss these issues, under the name
"Networking in the Small" (NITS). We had two NITS BOF meetings, in March and July of 1999. Peter Ford from Microsoft helped me co-chair those meetings, and we gathered
enough interest to warrant the formation of an official IETF Working Group, under the new name "Zero Configuration Networking", in September 1999. At that time, Erik Guttman
from Sun volunteered to co-chair the new Zeroconf working group with me, and he has been invaluable in helping keep the work on-track and moving forward for all this time.
The Zeroconf working group identified four requirements for "Zero Configuration Networking":
1. Devices need an IP address.
2. Users need to be able to refer to hosts by name, not by address.
3. Users need to be able to browse to find services on the network.
4. Future applications will need to be able to allocate multicast addresses.
IPv6 already has self-assigned link-local addresses, but IPv4 did not, so we produced a specification for how IPv4 devices can obtain self-assigned link-local addresses.
For name lookup, we have general agreement that DNS-format packets sent via IP Multicast are the right solution.
For browsing, I worked out how to do the thing that was suggested to me back in 1998, and wrote a draft called "Discovering Named Instances of Abstract Services using DNS"
(draft-cheshire-dnsext-nias-00.txt) which specifies how to do network browsing using just DNS-format query and response packets.
These specifications provide what we need to make dramatic ease-of-use improvements for local IP networking. However, these solutions do remain controversial with some IETF
participants. Although Apple is already shipping Rendezvous, we are continuing to work in the IETF Zeroconf Working Group to continue the ongoing development of these
protocols. Apple's intent is that as the protocol specifications continue to improve as a result of helpful intelligent discussion in the IETF community, we will be updating our
Rendezvous implementation to benefit from those improvements. This is a fairly normal state of affairs - most communications protocols continue to evolve and improve over time,
and good companies have an ongoing process of updating their implementations to benefit from those improvements.
Speaking of Apple, in addition to your role as Chairman for the ZEROCONF Working Group, you are also Wizard Without Portfolio at Apple Computer. I confess I have
no idea what that means, so what exactly is it that you do at Apple?
It is a pun on the British parliamentary title, "Minister Without Portfolio", which is like "Senator at Large" in the USA, meaning someone with general responsibilities, not restricted to
one particular area. For me, what it means is that I try to make sure I'm always looking at the big picture, not limiting my thinking to one particular narrow field.
Ah, I see. Steve Jobs at the Macworld keynote yesterday gave Rendezvous a significant spotlight during his Jaguar presentation. In particular, he demonstrated the
integration of Rendezvous into iChat, iTunes, and several network printers soon to be released by Epson, HP, and Lexmark. This definitely proves that Rendezvous is
just as useful for bringing plug-and-play, zero-configuration networking services to software and hardware devices as it is useful for networking computers
themselves. Can you elaborate further on what kind of functionality Rendezvous brings to software and hardware devices that simply hasn't been possible in the past?
I can't comment on specific Apple product plans, but I think you had some very interesting ideas in your "Backstage Pass to the Future" article. Rendezvous is not just about making
current networked devices easier to use. It is also about making it viable to put networking (i.e. Ethernet) on devices that today use USB or Firewire, and it is also about making it
viable to use networking in areas that you wouldn't have even considered before Rendezvous. Imagine a future world where you connect your television and amplifier and DVD player
with just a couple of Ethernet cables, instead of today's spaghetti mess of composite video, S-Video, component video, stereo audio, 5.1 Dolby, Toslink optical audio cables, etc.
One of my favorite examples that I've been giving since the early days of Zeroconf is this: I have friends who have bought a TiVo Personal Video Recorder, and then liked it so much
that they bought a second TiVo for the television in the bedroom. Now what is the problem? At night they turn on the bedroom television to watch a recorded episode of Seinfeld
before they go to sleep, but they can't because it is recorded on the other TiVo. Imagine if any TiVo in your house could automatically discover and play content recorded on any other
TiVo in your house. Sadly, I'm not aware of anyone from TiVo participating on the Zeroconf mailing list, so it may be a long time before we see anything like this, but I think you'll agree
this would be a very cool product.
So you would say Rendezvous delivers almost FireWire-like ease of use for networked devices?
I would go further than that. My long-term goal, from before I even started at Apple, is to eliminate the need for disparate incompatible technologies on your computer. Right now
your computer may have SCSI, Serial, IrDA, Bluetooth, USB, Firewire, Ethernet and AirPort, all communication technologies that each work a different way.
My hope is that in the future - distant future perhaps - your computer will only need one wired communication technology. It will provide power on the connector like USB and
FireWire, so it can power small peripheral devices. It will use IP packets like Ethernet, so it provides your wide-area communications for things like email and Web browsing, but it will
also use Zeroconf IP so that connecting local devices is as easy as USB or FireWire is today. People ask me if I'm seriously suggesting that your keyboard and mouse should use the
same connector as your Internet connection, and I am. There's no fundamental reason why a 10Mb/s Ethernet chip costs more than a USB chip. The problem is not cost, it is lack of
power on the Ethernet connector, and (until now) lack of autoconfiguration to make it work. I would much rather have a computer with a row of identical universal IP communications
ports, where I can connect anything I want to any port, instead of today's situation where the computer has a row of different sockets, each dedicated to its own specialized
function.
Well it sounds like you're working on some wonderful ideas and technologies there, and I'm very excited to see Apple adopting Rendezvous so readily for Jaguar. I'm
certain this will prove to be an important milestone in the evolution of networked computing. Stuart, thanks again for being here, and I wish you the best of luck in your
dual roles as ZEROCONF Chairman and Wizard Without Portfolio at Apple!
Thank you Jared.