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LAN Turns 30, May Not See 40?

Posted by Zonk on from the getting-senile dept.

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?"

3 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. NAT != Firewall. by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!
  2. Re:WAN, SCHMAN by ThinkingInBinary · · Score: 3, Informative

    That being said, I completely disagree with the author. There is no way that companies want to put all thier servers (not to mention clients) directly on the Internet. Firewalls will always exist for security reasons, and thus so will LANs.

    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
  3. Re:WAN, SCHMAN by Drencrom · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.