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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."
I'm amazed by how many posts there are talking about single-protocol-this and single-protocol-that. My favorites are the ones talking about how having a single protocol leads to licensing fees and restrictions, and the one about how a single protocol is insecure.
Didn't you losers even read the article? Rendezvous is basically two things: self-assigned link-local IP addressing, and automatic service discovery. In other words, you computer can automatically assign a local IP address to itself, then discover services available on other computers via particular UDP packets. Get two computers in proximity to each other, and they'll be able to ``see'' each other's shared volumes. Get one computer connected (wirelessly or wired-ly) to a printer, and the computer will be able to ``see'' the printer.
If you ever used Mac OS n (n poof.
RTFA, indeed.
IR is basically a serial port that uses IR instead of a wire to make the interconnect. Bluetooth uses 900Mhz to make the interconnect instead of LED's. USB is another serial protocol, just faster than RS-232. Same with firewire, just faster still. For the most part they are really just varied serial ports.
Ethernet(10BT,100BT,1000BT) is a bit different.
What we are seeing with firewire and USB is a progression of serial protocols towards an ethernet kinda environment, where there may be more than one device on the line at the same time and you can have little hubs/switches to coordinate the traffic.
I wouldn't really say that many of them are optimized for one thing or another. IR is just as limited as an RS-232 port, just made it easier on notebook designers to save space. USB was done since rs-232 had some serious speed limitations. Firewire for pretty much the same reason. Bluetooth - well...it was more of a way to elimnate wires...cool idea.
Zeroconf is not a protocol for letting devices talk to each other. As others have already pointed out, there are already protocols which are far better at doing that.
Zeroconf is a protocol for letting devices discover that other devices exist -- without requiring a human to explicitly tell each device.
Don't think that Zeroconf is trying to replace anything.
As for IPv6, true it already has link-local addressing. Thats 1 of the 4 things Zeroconf does. The auto-discovery of *other* devices isn't built into IPv6.
The "Single Protocol" Stuart is talking about is TCP/IP, not some newfangled daydream.
-pmb
The problem isn't going away. Ethernet null-modem cables are widely used with DSL modems, providing an unnecessary source of consumer confusion.
The video production industry gets it. The SMTPE standard connector for fibre-optic broadcast work is hermaphroditic, much to the relief of production crews.
There ought to be hermaphroditic connectors in USB and RJ11-like form factors, but there aren't.