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LAN Turns 30, May Not See 40?
dratcw writes "The first commercial LAN was based on ARCnet technology and was installed some 30 years ago, according to a ComputerWorld article. Bob Metcalfe, one of the co-inventors of Ethernet, recalls the early battles between the different flavors of LAN and says some claims from the Token Ring backers such as IBM were lies. 'I know that sounds nasty, but for 10 years I had to put up with that crap from the IBM Token Ring people — you bet I'm bitter.' Besides dipping into networking nostalgia, the article also quotes an analyst who says the LAN may be nearing its demise and predicts that all machines will be individually connected to one huge WAN at gigabit speeds. Could the LAN actually be nearing the end of its lifecycle?"
My thought exactly. When I first started working for the company I do now, every one of the workstations on campus had a public IP address. And then all of the sudden people started getting Net Send messages for Viagra.
I don't want every computer in the world to be able to see my computer, at least not directly. Perhaps I'm missing a point here but seems to me that as long as there is a need for firewalls, there is going to be a need for LAN's.
You should have been using RG-58 and 50 ohm terminators... things work much better with the right equipment.
There's nothing more to say to you until you get that one, crucial point: Firewalls do not have to be NATs, and NATs don't have to firewall. And you need a firewall whether or not you have a NAT.
Once you do, understand that NAT is a brutally ugly hack. It's much easier and more powerful to simply be able to open a firewall port than to have to forward ports.
And you do need a firewall on your computer -- that, or just turn services off. If you don't do one of the two, wireless will bite you someday.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Who the fuck said anything about wireless?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_network
Seriously, in a corp that big, your machines need to be as secure as if they were on the internet anyway. You can't and won't secure that much cable, building and personnel.
I think LANs will continue to exist out of sheer practicality though. What's easier, wiring up every computer in the building to the internet, or wiring the building computers together and then getting internet to one of them?
I am trolling
ArcNet - Proprietary(DataPoint) 1Mbps - token passing protocol via bus topology on coax
Token Ring - IEEE 802.5 - 4/16 Mbps - token passing protocol on star wired ring topology on SPT/UTP
Ethernet - IEEE 802.3 - CSMA/CD - 10Base5 Thicknet(500 meters) - 10Base2 thinnet (185meters) 4 repeater rule - 10Bt, 100Bt, 1000Bt (100m)
FDDI - ANSI X3T9.5 - Token passing protocol - ring topology on fiber - Supported UTP
ATM - ATM Forum - SONET physical layer - Ring/Star topology - uses OC-X speeds and feeds - 25mbps copper spec
And the LAN winner is Ethernet because of simplicity, scalability, installed base and cost. Other technologies such as ATM were so much more superior and elegant but too complex and costly for most IT shops.
You still send 8 bytes of preamble, which is the part of the packet needed for collision detect, and have an interpacket gap, even on a switch. All that the switch does is prevent you from sending all packets to all branches, it doesn't eliminate the collision detect timing. On fibre channel, packets can be closely spaced because idle characters keep synchronization.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
...from people that do not unserstand how tese things work. The LAN is not about technology. It is about hierachical organization, proplem encapsulation and cost. These factors will not go away, wery likely not ever.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well, there is a middle ground. Most of the "security" from firewalls today comes from the fact that a public IP will have just a handful of ports forwarded to an internal box, and the services on the box will be listening on the LAN IP. Basically, NAT of various sorts protected everything by default, and you forwarded what you want. Once IPv6 becomes widespread, firewalls will simply restrict the data going in and out, rather than redirecting it to different IPs and/or ports. There will still be home routers/firewalls, but (hopefully) all the boxen behind them won't hide behind their (the routers') addresses.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
Firewalls will always exist for security reasons, and thus so will LANs
A firewall does not require NAT to be secure.
You can have a firewall in the router with public IP addresses on both sides and it will still work just fine.
Not only that, you will lose all the addressing space that makes IPv6 so attractive by doing it that way. As of 2000, there were more then 105 million households in the US alone. Now attempting to give every household a home address so they could route all their other equipment without using subneting or private ip addresses like the "FE80:" prefix would result in a vast majority of IP being none usable after the home block. This isn't even starting to consider the large companies or even small businesses which presumably would have a "home" address as well as larger blocks for the 5 hundred or more terminals inside a single building and all the network printers, copy/scanner machines, postal scales, X11 lighting fixtures and so on. The demand is huge but the waist in assigning minor blocks to every home or Internet connection system like that is worse. Then when you consider the unicast, multicast, loopback and other IP reservations within the IPv6 spec, multiply the number of people/house holds and businesses in other countries and you will soon see how this seemingly unlimited addressing will become as obsolete as IPv4 with all the waist involved. The spec for IPv6 has a private IP space built into it for a reason. And this spec uses a prefix instead of site level aggregation for a reason too. That reason is that it was never meant to connect everything publicly, it was only meant to fix problems with the IPv4 schema and make it last well into the future..