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Rendezvous, Microsoft And Apple
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."
They come out with the coolest technologies and they just work great!
That's what she said.
I can't believe I actually posted this. Wait...Yeah, I can.
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.
The author suggests that Apple should release a Rendezvous enabled VOIP app. It seems to me that he's almost hit the nail on the head. Imagine if all new Macs came with not only that app, but also a phone jack that you could plug your telephone into. Maybe partner with a long distance company to provide a .Mac internet-to-phone calling plan! The possibilities are wide open for a company who owns the hardware, the software, and has little bit of capital.
the real question is if this will dissapear into obscurity as JINI has (a similar technology using Java).
I work for a high-tech company, that must remain nameless, and in my work I talk to IT people on a regular basses across the U.S. I am astounded that most of these people even have jobs. I must however convey that every now and then I come across a person of the highest integrity and the ability to get the job done right. The sad part is, that this only happens in about one in twenty contacts, way too low of a number to have these people running our country. When they've been bad, I have no idea how the company is even running, but when they've been good, it's been crystal clear why they hold that position and are an asset to the computing world.
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.
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.
-- clvrmnky
"You walked into a room bearing a laptop running Jaguar (the latest version of the OS X operating system) with a wireless networking (Wi-Fi) card, and you could instantly see the iTunes music files of everyone else in the room with a similar setup."
AWESOME!!!
-H. Rosen
What's the state of ZeroConf on Linux? How long before the major distributions have out-of-the-box support for Rendezvous? What would be required to make that happen?
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...
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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!
--- Ban humanity.
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 --
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
This article is perfectible...
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.
Not open source?
I wonder what that source download is.
Or mod_rendezvous for Apache.
Or the CVS access.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
What the hell are you talking about?
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.
Sure this "instant networking" is all very cool, but for most geeks in the know, we *want* to be able to configure till we die.
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.
"In mathematics, it's not enough to read the words -- you have to hear the music"
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?
Looks like there are sourceforge projects here and here (although the first project actually has code, and the 2nd looks just like a description.)
Not to mention you can get the "real" rendezvous source here from Apple.
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.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
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.
Here is a PDF file that explains the technology behind this a little better...but does not go into too much detail regarding security. It sounds like you can choose what you want to share.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. --Edmund Burke
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.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
If you hurry, you might be able to get one in time to save Valentine's Day.
Since Rendezvous is based on Zeroconf, here is an paper explaining how to secure a zerconf network. Perhaps this will slow the FUD.
Rendezvous is not just an Apple product - it is on the way to being an Internet standard, with an IETF working group and two Internet drafts in progress - one on Auto configuration of hosts and the other on the Dynamic configuration of IP Addresses.
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.
The big criticism of of AppleTalk was that it was too chatty (really, I think the issue was overblown, but that was the reputation it picked up). And yet, Rendezvous seems to be doing a lot of the same things that AppleTalk was doing.
Has Rendezvous really addressed the issue that got AppleTalk locked out of a lot of corporate networks? I wonder how it compares to AT.
As mentioned, since Rendezvous is based on zeroconf, here is a paper explaining how to secure a zerconf network. Facts vs. FUD. Let the better approach win.
How does security fit into DNS? Or any other low-level protocol? Does TCP authenticate your remote logins? No, but a protocol higher up on the stack does (like SSH). Rendezvous is a low-level protocol and does not deal with security. You can build an insecure web browser *g* as easily as you can an insecure Rendezvous app.
:-)
Correct me if I am wrong.
Why bother.
Yeah, but it could be better.
...Bill's boxes to Steve's elegant machines.
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"
c-hack.com |
That's the point. It's not written by the guy who is known to be a real zealot.
Apple Developer Site Apple Developer Site
SourceForge SourceForge
Strangeberry Java implementation
International University and Sun Microsystems supported a collaborative research program. Java source code
If Apple creates a Rendezvous implementation for Windows I fail to see how Apple's market share will grow. It will enable PC users to get the benefits of Rendezvous without owning a Mac. It will also allow existing Mac users connect with their PC using co-workers and friends. And since it is a completely open technology the PC users will not even need a Mac involved at all. So that begs the questions, how will this benefit Apple?
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.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
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 itself, I'd like to read about it.
That is easy, as soon as someone implements Rendezvous, seeing how it is open source... I love Apple!
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
I believe the point that the author was making was that this is one more tool to reduce platform-dependence. The more freely programs and peripherals are able to communicate with one another across various platforms, the more Microsoft and Windows shrink into the background.
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.
I thought that enabling PC users to get the benifts was almost the point of this kind of thing. Instead of Apple trying to adapt to a Windows standard, everyone uses a standard that Apple knows pretty well how to deal with. Apple can play well with others using an open standard. They aren't the misfit children anymore.
Paperclip? That's the most out-of-date trolling I've seen in a while, LOL. Here let me finish for you:
The best demo of Rendezvous currently is iChat. I used it to wow one of my clients back in December when I upgraded them to Jaguar. They were always having to e-mail files back and forth to one another, blah blah blah.
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
It's quite relevant. One of the points of the article was that I/T configuration is a significant cost for companies, and the poster took it further by pointing out that competent I/T help is a factor that exacerbates the problem. The poster also correctly points out that in some places, Apple faces a severe uphill climb, because they're not even considered by some I/T "professionals" who've never given their products more than a cursory examination. In other places, I/T professionals (actual ones) have a wide grasp of technologies, not tied to a single vendor or platform, and they'll use whichever one seems to be the best value for the investment.
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.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Remember when you used to be able to telnet into your hosting account?
.. because users have to configure them manually, and we can't expect them to all get it right! So a zeroconf network is actually a good thing .. the details of what gets shared and open by default is left to computer security professionals instead of users who don't know any better or dont have the time/money to properly educate themselves as to how to secure a wireless network.
.. lets keep the bathwater! All we really need to do is keep aware of the design and out of the box configuration of the bathtub, and improve it as neccessary. Fortunately, even in MSes case, that is the trend. Ship or auto-configure in a conservative state, and try and limit the amount of times it becomes neccessary for people who may not be experts to tinker. (And before you jump on me, yes, it should be simple and easy for an expert to override zeroconf situations.)
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
"Old man yells at systemd"
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?
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
"You could get promiscuous with strangers: you could pair and exchange a song on the same short bus ride."
And strangers will be following you around as you walk the streets, trying to download the last few megabytes of that Metallica album.
graspee
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.
While they didn't invent zero-conf I believe that the head of the steering committee is and has been a full time Apple employee.
Go out and get sailing!
I've only read a bit about it, but as far as I understand it, Rendezvous systems only broadcast when they first come on line. They broadcast - 'Here I am and here are my services'. At that point all the other machines on the net cache that info. Then they broadcast a 'who else is out there' message' so that they can sync up with other machines that booted previously. If any new service comes on line after bootup, only the info for that new service is broadcast, and only once. So, once a network is set up, there are no 'continuous' broadcasts to clog the network. I believe a system can broadcast a message to tell the net to resync at any time, but that is not normally required and shouldn't happen very often.
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.
This is great! You could set up a rendezvous-enabled console app that would be able to describe to you the services available to you in whatever room you were in. Just imagine the possibilities! Let's say you took your laptop to a new company...
*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