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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.
Umm... Is it just me, or does this seems to be a little bit of a shot across the bow of Microsoft? Here we have Apple giving something to the community that will add some seriously cool networking capabilities, capabilities the likes of which have traditionally fallen within the realm of the OS itself. At the very least this takes away the ability for MS to use something like this for a "New in Longhorn!" marketing point.
I can't imagine that this makes MS particularly happy, but there's certainly not much they can do about it. Rendevous is seriously a cool technology, and I'm glad Apple decided to release it before MS came up with something similar but incompatible (and, of course, under their control).
Admittedly this argument could be made for Solaris, etc. But I would imagine those communities welcome this addition, whereas I would imagine MS to be a bit colder to the idea.
In any event, kudos to Apple.
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...
Now I don't have to switch to a Mac to have a machine that "just works" on my company's mostly-Mac network!
The CB App. What's your 20?
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
for A = 0 to 255
for B = 0 to 255
for C = 0 to 255
for D = 0 to 255
ping A.B.C.D
if (there was a response) then store A.B.C.D in list Q
next
next
next
next
print list Q
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
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).
I have a feeling this will be implemented into standard Linux use real fast. Having this technology for every platform will really help portability of hardware I think too. This is going to be another one of those things that Windows implements but does it horribly unstable so no one can really use it.
Whoever dies with the most toys wins.
Sweet! My PC just found my Microwave!!!
/home/daringone#setmwave 1m
/home/daringone#startmwave
/home/daringone#
/home/daringone#
Microwave set to 1 minute
Your food is cooking.
Your food is done.
"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.
If you look at it using a sniffer like ethereal, it's actually multicast DNS, so it will work with either IPv4 or IPv6 as it's a layer-4 thing.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
given this is one of the fundamental technologies used for discovery and saring data in itunes, i am surprised it took them so long to release it. It also means that people can write more itunes compatible players (hint to all those linux itunes knockoffs). compatible in the sense that it will appear as a avaiable share and will see other shares on the network. Now all we need is an icaht compatible chat client so that people on a lan do not need a central server to IM :).
It will also be interesting to see how this is applied node discovery in existing p2p systems like gnutella
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
How about YOU implement DHCP, if it is so vital to you? Mr. Jobs DID just open the code base, after all, in part for that very reason.
I mean honestly - you whine that it needs to be open so you can code the changes you need, and then you whine when it's finally opened because it doesn't have the features coded for you in advance?
For anyone who is interested, Rendezvous is Apple's implementation of of ZeroConf
While Apple's Rendezvous overview gives some decent information, the ZeroConf site provides a lot of good technical resources.
Apple really needed ZeroConf as they transitioned to all-IP networking. Although OS X supports AppleTalk, the AppleTalk protocol has clearly seen it's day and the world is clearly moving to IP-only. Previously, when Macintosh machines were largely communicating via AppleTalk, all of the things that ZeroConf addresses were handled by the AppleTalk protocol suite (service discovery, address allocation, etc), and this ease of use that is signature to the Macintosh is important for Apple to maintain.
That said, Apple releasing this code is pretty significant, as aside from this project, there hasn't been much use of ZeroConf in the wild.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
We've launched this only a few weeks ago: Pocketster. It contains an implementation of Rendezvous for the Pocket PC and it also gives you wireless filesharing capabilities (we have a new version coming out on July 6th). It's free, so give it a try if you want (that is if you have a Pocket PC). Also, you might want to check JmDNS (Java version of Rendezvous) and Howl for a Windows implementation. Razvan
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
I wouldn't call UPNP "superior" by any stretch of the imagination.
Comparisons have been done. I'd rather have low traffic and better service separation vs the "use-http-for-everything" strategy.
UDP traffic is pretty lightweight. ZeroConf is basically just some ICMP traffic (when the nodes are assigning themselves addresses) and then DNS. Apple's implementation will aggressively cache query results, and the devices incremementally scale back their announcements.
Another nice feature is that nodes can cache the results of other nodes' queries. Since all of the DNS traffic is mulitcast on the local subnet, every node sees every query and every response. Apple's code expolits this to further reduce the need for duplicate queries. It's a pretty nice setup.
Apple continues to surprise me with their interest in designing software that is compatible for the Windows platform in addition to their own (and in this case, also Unix and GNU/Linux). While from Microsoft, they have typically steered to their flagship products and rarely ported them (with the exception of Office and IE) to other OSes.
Even as a frequent Windows user I have great respect for Apple and find their software for Windows actually crashes less then Microsoft made software(!). In addition, they are rarely so deeply entrenched in the OS that if you wanted ot change extension preferences it doesn't fuss as much.
I'd be interested in trying out this new technology and I'm sure it will make it big hit on all network sizes. Good thing for Apple that they released the specs before MS could claim any competing service! Let's all give some positive input to see this software hit new limits!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
Rendezvous is three things:
- automatic link-local IP addressing for cases where DHCP fails (like APIPA)
- multicast DNS for announcing device names (.local domain)
- service announcements and discovery via DNS-SD
Mac OS X also supported SLP, but Rendezvous / ZeroConf is clearly the more comprehensive technology, as several projects (such as GNOME) are actually moving *over*.
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.
Microsoft has been in alpha now for a bit with a product called "Windows NCD Technology" (I'm a tester). This is Apple's shot across MS's bow.
From the alpha page, Windows Network Connected Device (NCD) Technology is a comprehensive set of Windows technologies that allow devices on a local network to discover, communicate with, and control each other.
Around the early 90's, Apple developed a prototype operating system called Pink, which they later spun off into a company called Taligent, with the help of IBM and Hewlett Packard. Here is an old article about it and why it was canned. I remember reading something about how former Apple CEO John Scully gave a demonstration to some people of what looked like the Macintosh operating system running on a PC. As I recall it could run on both Mac and PC hardware platforms, and was designed in such a way that programmers could create programs that ran on both platforms through object-oriented programming. I purchased a book on it ages ago in which it was described as an "application system". It was meant to be a true cross-platform operating system.
ZeroConf means a visiting professor walks into a lab at a university and can automatically print. There's zero configuration.
It means an iTunes user can broadcast their library on the network and another iTunes user can pick it up with no problem. There's zero configuration.
It means I can open iChat, not go onto AOL's network, and see my coworkers down the hallway with zero configuration.
It means I can share a workgroup document we are editing in SubEthaEdit and easily invite coworkers on the LAN. There's zero configuration
And now it means that non-Mac users can start getting in on a lot of the same stuff.
- Allocate addresses without a DHCP server.
- Translate between names and IP addresses without a DNS server.
- Find services, like printers, without a directory server.
- Allocate IP Multicast addresses without a MADCAP server.
You are quite accurately describing point 3 whereas the parent was describing points 1,2 and 4. But ALL FOUR are rendezvous/zeroconf.zeroconf enabled DHCP server can point you in the right direction. Zeroconf outside of local networks makes no sense. When you ask for all the local printers, you don't want to get every one on the entire frickin internet.
For enterprise wide networks, you zeroconf/rendezvous acquire a DHCP server and a Directory server. From there, they will point you to the rest of the services in your enterprise *outside* of your local network.
Correct multicast switching is not a problem. Do you personally mess with something that intentionally messes up the broadcast address in TCP/IP?
Stuart Cheshire, the guy that first proposed Zeroconf and started the ZeroConf group did so as an Apple employee on Apple's dime. I think it's fair to say that it is an Apple technology that they opened up as a standard from the very beginning. This announcement is just that Apple is opening up it's own in-house implementation of an open standard that also started in their labs.
I cant wait for my network to fill with UDP broadcasts!
This is basically how system-linked xboxes work.
It's cute for little networks that consist of an apple, a printer and an ipod, but it doesn't scale well.
Sorry to be blunt - but how the hell do you know how well it scales? Have you read the relevant drafts? I have - and it's actually amazing how much work Cheshire and Krochmal put into making sure it would be extremely scalable. I don't know hard numbers on what the upper limits on subnet size would be, but I was recently at on a LAN with more than 500 Macs connected with no noticeable effect on the network. Sure there's a limit somewhere, but it's way way way above "a Mac and a printer".
I like my dhcp, that I can control based on MAC addresses.
But kudos to Apple for opening this source. They really had to, you know, one thing they desperately have to overcome is the awkwardness of mixing Mac's and PCs on the same network.
The source has been open ever since they started it. All they're doing now is making easily distributed binaries and SDK's available.
- This is not Appletalk. IT is new.
- This is open
- The *key* feature is the mDNS system.
- Yes, it does automatic IP allocation if there is no DHCP server.. so does Windows (though apple is much faster at it for some reason).
- mDNS is not to be confused with "The global DNS system" that you use to lookup Address records, etc, though it can do that. mDNS is DNS adapted to multicast, for service and host discovery. HOw?
- Instead of querying a DNS server, you query a multicast group (the link-local group in this case) and say "Who has a webserver?" or "who has ssh?" or "hey FOO, what is your IP?" or.. more importantly "Who is a real internet DNS server?" or "Who has an internet gateway?". "Who else is running itunes?".
- a machine joining the network will broadcast once, to send out that it has joined, and what services it has, also via mDNS... so anyone listening can update their caches, etc. The opposite happens when it leaves.
This does not create an extra burden of traffic. Previous to this, most protocols that need to find something in the network do so by rather rude broadcasts.. and usually generate quite a bit of unnecessary traffic.
YES, having a set infrastructure, DNS servers, DHCP, etc, and using DHCP to hardcode everything else, avoiding the need for local network discovery is more efficient. The point is, this works very well WITHOUT any infrastructure.. like 10 guys sitting in a conference room with wireless cards and no servers... or 3 guys on the bus. etc.
NO, rendezvous does not grant ACCESS to your computer.. it merely discovers advertised services... much like an X browser can find a bunch of remote X desktops, or windows TS can find all the terminal servers in the network, or the "network neighborhood" list is populated in windows. It's just a more elegant, scaleable approach.
- mDNS is *not* dns... it is mDNS but if you understand DNS you will understand mDNS. They chose to not make a new protocol, and instead adapt an existing one... which makes it much easier to learn and work with.