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Apple Releases Rendezvous for Linux, Java, Windows
mblase writes "Apple released yesterday a developers preview of their Rendezvous technology for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and Java. Rendezvous is an open protocol which uses industry standard IP protocols to allow devices to automatically find each other without the need to enter IP addresses or configure DNS servers."
Reader xxdarkxxmatterxx adds a link to a story at Macworld about the release."
THIS is one of the reasons I'm prepared to pay a premium for Apple kit.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Following the link to the developer site we find that:
Rendezvous requires that devices implement three essential things. These devices must be able to
allocate IP addresses without a DHCP server
translate between names and IP addresses without a DNS server
locate or advertise services without using a directory server
ok...
to release more home electronics type products. After all why would they need Rendevous on non-mac platformsm, unless they were planning on selling a networking device that hooks up to the home network? (like, say, a digital video device or some other home theatre component)
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
The only stuff I want to have interconnect is my stuff to my other stuff, not your stuff to my stuff. I'd rather see a simple-to-config protocol than a zero-config autodiscovery protocol.
-PM
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Sounds like sort of an advanced DHCP. Is this for implementation on an IPV6 or standard IP4 network? Does it include building routing tables between objects as well? Maybe someone can explain it better than I understand it.
Rendezvous/ZeroConf is basically Appletalk for IP. While Appletalk had its shortcomings, it was awesome for setting up small networks. Just plug + play, no DNS/DHCP/etc BS to worry about. Appletalk's gone the way of the dodo, replaced by this (which works on an IP network).
"Rendezvous technology is now available on Windows 2000 and XP. This preview release includes full link-local support, allowing Windows machines to discover advertised HTTP and FTP servers using Internet Explorer"
Given that Apple today joined the announcement with Mozilla and Opera of open-standards for web plugins it surprises me that their product even suggests the use of Internet Explorer.
I freely admit to hoping, someday, for Safari on Windows and using Firefox until that day (And pls don't reply saying Safari is on Windows in iTunes.. iTMS on Windows doesn't use Webcore, more's the pity.)
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
A cursory examination of some of their documents seems to indicate the plan involves what they're calling DNS-SD (DNS-based service discovery) which is a way of encapsulating device id and configuration information within DNS records, and specifically making use of special conventions for TXT data.
If this is the case, it seems a pretty clever and resourceful approach.
Then again, this will make DNS servers the main entry point for discovering information about networks, especially information that might normally not be publicly available.
Personally, I like this approach because far less people have access to manage detailed DNS data and may actually be able to manage these things effectively, but there's also a ton of people out there who have insecure DNS information and adoption of this approach among those admins who haven't secured their networks might create an even bigger security problem.
This is a wonderful concept for small to medium sized networks but I can forsee that it will not scale well. If you read into the RFCs a bit it seems that the services location action and the ability to find things without a DNS server rely heavily on the use of DNS via multicast. This is a great idea in principle but the design of a large scale network with correct multicast switching is tough to do from scratch ... let alone reverse engineer your network with multiple flavors of switching gear (cisco, avaya, etc) to handle all the multicast traffic correctly. Sadly, I have to admit that centralized IP based active directory controlled "dynamic DNS" is about the only thing that I have seen that will scale well at the REALLY BIG network level. In addition, I see no mention of the protocol being able to traverse a router. WTF good is a /16 address space if it can't get across a router? Can someone say "DNS helper acl"?
Several times I've had the need to print something while in an unfamiliar network. It takes just a few seconds to find and send a job to a printer using Rendezvous. At first it seems ludicrously easy, like it won't actually work. But it does.
In a laptop-centric world, Rendezvous makes life a lot easier.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Microsoft has netbios as well which announces computers/printers on a network by UDP broadcasts. So why do we need this software again?
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Actually, if you'd looked at the RFCs, you might have noticed that Microsoft co-wrote one of them. If you'd actually read it, you might have noticed that they'd been implementing something very similar to it since (at least) Windows 95.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
This "protocol" basically combines several different pre-existing protocols. It seems most like a combination of Auto-IP addressing and SLP. The thing is that OS X and several other OSes including Netware and Linux already use SLP. Now Apple wants everyone to change again?
Here's the really strange part. With SLP, unless you do static configurations, the requests are sent via multi cast. This creates an issue because most routers are not configured to handle multicasting so the SLP scope is limited to the local segment.
Apple's new protocol relies on multicast DNS where, DNS requests are sent via multicast. But, the problem with multicasts being restricted to the local segment still exists. This means that Rendezvous offers no clear advantage over SLP, an already defined and implemented standard. So, why should anyone adopt Rendezvous?
And this from Apple's website:
NT Migration Tool Tiger Server makes it a snap to upgrade your aging Windows NT network to a Mac OS X server. The new NT Migration Tool automatically extracts all of your user and group account information from an existing Windows Primary Domain Controller and moves it into Open Directory. Tiger Server can then take over as your Primary Domain Controller for your Windows clients and even host your Windows users' home directories, group folders, roaming profiles and shared printers.
So they're making it easier for NT users to migrate their network over to Tiger when it is released. And now this Rendesvous news. Sounds like Apple is quite serious about wanting to be a player in the enterprise server market if you ask me.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
We estimated 6 months of development effort to do uPnP in our embedded network device, and 2 do to zeroconf.
Guess which protocol our device now supports?
uPnP may be technically superior, but more devices will support zeroconf.
I thought this was already open, how does this differ from apps that have been out for some time like HOWL
Rendezvous, like HOWL, is an implementation of Zeroconf.
This sounds allot like apple's dashboard, and how it's a direct rip of Konfabulator!
FYI, Rendezvous was released to the public July 17, 2002, almost a year before HOWL (June 10, 2003). Apple released it open source, so it's not surpising that they now have released cross-platform implementations.
because I'm probably not the only person who downloaded the rendezvouz code months ago, compiled it and have been running it on their linux box.
Rendezvouz enabled clients on my home network will find my linux box available over rendezvouz for AFP, FTP, SSH, HTTP and IPP.
Mac users will feel (and have felt for quite some time) right at home on my network.
The link is a very interesting article - more interesting than the initial story.
To me, it looks like the largest drawback to UPnP is that it defines too much and becomes inflexible. While the current implementation of Rendezvous is directed at home networks and networks without much infrastructure, I can't see why it couldn't scale out. If / when it scales out, it will intrude on more than just UPnP. It could also kick butt all over MS's UDDI for web services. Here's a scenario for which I could profitably use a more scalable Rendezvous type functionality, where neither UPnP or UDDI would work well:
A service gets a name, independent of the machine. Clients of all types find and connect to the service. For example, we've got a critical Job Status service, that collects information about myriad automated jobs so that the staff responsible for a set of jobs can quickly check if any of their jobs are misbehaving.
Say the computer running the Job Status service blows up and rolls over to a different device (or we painfully restore it on another device). Certain fancy expensive data base servers handle this rollover smoothly - but not my home grown application. I get it almost for free with Rendezvous (expect moving the service). Because the client connects to a service name, it finds the new service seamlessly. No configuration file push, no changing C-Names in the active directory (which requires arguing with about 4 departments in my company) . Just bring up the same service name on a new device.
Rendezvous could apply to any service - not just web services as with UDDI. Also unlike UDDI, there is no need for a single point of failure (the server with the UDDI directory). Unlike UPNP, I don't have to jump through hoops to describe my service, or attempt to conform it to an existing specification - and the current ones are really focussed on devices. I don't really care about describing my service in grand detail. I can assume an application designed to work with knows how it works.
The main thing missing from Rendezvous for this scenario is scalability. Rendezvous could solve this easily by stealing the controller model for UPnP. Put up 5 or 10 controllers on our 10,000 device network. Each client knows about a few of them. You can handle the load and don't have a single point of failure.
My motto: "A cat is no trade for integrity."
Yes, and at the risk of ruining a perfectly good karma, I will point out that after trying and failing for half an hour to print a web-based document from my Linux machine on my employer's network printers, I put my PowerBook on the net and started the print job in less than 30 seconds via Rendezvous discovery.
But the really cool thing is that the HP printers on the net show up in Safari's Bookmark bar Rendezvous menu, providing HTML interfaces for printer status and settings.
Huh. The IETF might disagree...
The part that is important is specifying the commands and data to/from devices.
Which already exists as other protocols. It's better to separate the device/application-specific stuff from the transport. We learned that lesson from IP.
We learned this lesson back with SCSI-1.
No, we didn't. Your example ignores the fact that protocols already exist to perform these functions. Why reengineer IPP when it already exists?
A lightweight approach is best, which is what Zeroconf provides.
I wonder - and forgive my ignorance if I'm asking/stating something untrue/stupid: if Rendezvous is "just" an implementation of Zeroconf, why all the "Kudos!" to Apple for "giving back to the community" (not you, ashpool7, but in this discussion)?
Because, I don't see people praising Apple for 802.11x ("Airport"!) or IEEE1394 ("Firewire"!) in quite the same way...
As I understand it, they didn't come up with the underlying technology(?) but rather made an implementation. And now, under their own license, release that implementation - source code to registered users. And again, if I understand this correctly, there are already other Zeroconf implementations, apart from Apple's?
I'm not trying to troll or flame here, but from what I read in the article ashpool7 linked to, I honestly don't understand why Apple are made out to be such heroes. Anyone care to explain?
668.5
You're right, thanks. Upon further reading, I came to realize this too (replies to this post and the Zeroconf page).
:)
My bad, Apple does seem to rock in this case
668.5
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/02/07/Sha redSourceCLI/default.aspx
It is really fun when your high school network administrators know nothing about it, so all the Rendezvous enabled printers are sitting on the network advertising their settings menu with no password protection at all. I'm not the malicious type (and I want to cover my ass), so I didn't change anything, but it was a huge security hole.
I discovered this by using my PowerBook at school one day and looking at the bookmarks in Safari. I'm one of the few that brings Apple laptops to school, and probably the only that knows of Rendezvous bookmarks. It is sad Apple develops all this cool technology and most people don't know about much of it.
Andrew
We have an internal network here at work that is about 80%/20% mac/pc. The main laser printer is attached to a mac and shared over rendezvous. My Mac discovered the printer instantly and i print to it all the time. My PC sitting right next to me had this developer preview installed yesterday, and I immediately fired up the rendezvous printer setup wizard. Only to discover that it told me there were no rendezvous printers on the network.
(Not the original poster, but I'll respond anyway.) It's not like su at all... it's like different terminals. Each virtual terminal is a new login.
What was described with the Fn keys is a bit clunky, IMHO. There's no automatic security on there -- you can switch to another open terminal just by hitting the appropriate button. However, I remember Ximian adding a 'New Login...' option to the GNOME menu sometime around 1.4(?). It performed just like the fast user switching in XP/OSX... you get an XDM/GDM/KDM login window asking for a username and password, and the display on the original login just got locked like XScreensaver does. It was fairly well hidden, so not many people seem to know it was there, but I used it frequently and loved it. And this was before XP came out -- I remember wondering why MS acted like switching users on the fly was such a big deal when I'd been doing it in Linux already.
- fader
What you see as a conspiracy is actually two companies with different business models.
That may be so, but in the big picture, Apple and "Wintel" are in direct competition with each other. Just think about all the computer manufacturers from the 80's with their own OSes that went under, like Commodore and Atari. They all couldn't compete against the Wintel industry. Apple would have gone under as well if they didn't get an infusion of $150 million from Microsoft in 1997.
One of the factors that drove companies under was the lack of third party software and peripherals. A cross-platform OS with a good market share could eliminate this problem for computer manufacturers, provided peripheral drivers could also be cross-platform. According to a previous post, Apple was looking into an intel version of their OS up until the point Microsoft invested in them. Apple wouldn't have done so if they didn't see it as an avenue they might have to take.
in my personal experience, good school IT infrastructure is nearly non existent.