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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?"
Could the LAN actually be nearing the end of its lifecycle?
Yes. All computers in the future will be stand alone and the Interweb will be shut down.
Somewhat interesting article, stupid summary question.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
... the lan isn't going to disappear, at least not in 10 years. Can you imagine IBM, a defense corp, a huge pharma, etc... ditching their lans for wireless? yeah right, not any time soon.
Patriot - A fan of expanding government power and spending while not wanting to pay higher taxes.
Or at least, they should, but then people do some pretty stupid things sometimes.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Don't trust any spec over 40.
wait...
Ice Cream has no bones.
doesn't matter what you want to call it, two computers connected to a local router/hub is a LOCAL area network.
Yes yes, and we'll have flying cars and robots cooking our meals.
Prognosticator didn't used to be a synonym for clueless shithead. Thanks to Dvorak, that has changed, and looking at the clueless shitheads he's spawned.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Could the LAN actually be nearing the end of its lifecycle?
Not as long as they let me control my own home network...
This guy's the limit!
It's not LAN vs wireless, it's LAN vs WAN.
Running a WAN without using LANs throughout is nonsense. IIRC a WAN is just bridged LANs by definition. Proposing that all the LANs will have one node is just silly.
Typical Bob Metcalfe of recent years. The man has lost it. Granted I haven't bothered reading anything he's written in a few years.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Let me count the ways:
Infanet
ARCnet
10Net
Appletalk
Token Ring
Ethernet: Thick/thin/UTP/STP/fibre/wireless
AT&ROFLMAO
We call that 'Intranet' nowadays.
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.
The LAN as we knew it, the one ethernet cable going through all rooms and being looped on the wall with a small jumper, is already dead for a long time.
The LAN as we know it, one central switch with a lot of ethernet cables getting out to individual ports in rooms, has been here for ages.
What didn't go away was the local addressing methods for sending data to all hosts (broadcast) and interaction with higher level protocols (ARP for determining the IP address).
The LAN as we are going to know it, a bunch of intercepted central-and-not-so-central switches which put you in the right (V)LAN when you plug in your computer to a random port connected to it, is here also if your organisation requires it, but for smaller organisations this is not really necessary:
and predicts that all machines will be individually connected to one huge WAN at gigabit speeds
You need a gigabit WAN for that to work, not all smaller organisations have the need for this. But yes I have rolled it out for two customers.
bash$
Funny. I'd been talking about this MiniTruth and Token Ring phenomena with a friend just the other day. Whilst being all corporate, actually had an IBM SE come up to me and tell me that I was risking my [redacted big honkin company] through the advocacy of Ethernet.
Two months later, at a big conference for all True Believers conducted by IBM, actually heard IBM plants in the audience doing the amen corner thing with Greek Chorus of "alas, Ethernet would kill the King" lines.... up to the "802.3 will make it hurt when you pee" level of nonsense.
The fact that a 3745 [burly iron werken] running remotely was actually running on the backup token ring thingie for a month before it fell over and died because the primary ring had never worked [vague memory of route discovery]was, well, pretty f'n sweet.
IBM's always been a great company, seriously, but the LAN wars were not its finest hour.
Verizon: Latin for "poor rural service".
It doesn't work that way, it's more like a game of chicken-- one guy gets a router first, and then everyone else hops on. First hand experience here :)
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
As long as residential ISPs only let you have 1 IP address, there will be LANs. Maybe they will get more generous with IPv6 (yeah right).
Since the rise of switches and demise of hubs, the topological difference between a LAN and a WAN is a lot less important.
In the old days, the concept of "lan segments" actually had meaning. Barring special redundancy features, a flaky device or a kink in the cable could bring down the whole network. Now it typically brings down just the link between two devices.
Now Ethernet is pretty much point-to-point: device-to-switch/router or switch-router to switch/router along a dedicated connection.
The local area network is dead. Long live the world-wide-area-network.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Whatever the limitations of 802.11 may or may not currently be, that doesn't mean much about the long-term prospects of wireless. 10 years ago I would have thought reclaiming the analog TV spectrum would be impossible, now it's happening before our eyes. Outside of a post-nuclear attack scenario, I can't think of any reason to say wireless is inherently unreliable.
That reasoning amounts to expecting every doorway from every room to open onto a major automotive freeway.
... and because even Internet backbones can't handle the load of routing data for everyone's personal networked printers, storage servers, and media terminals.
LANs will survive indefinitely precisely because sometimes your data is just feet or yards away
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Until WAN routers are cheap and reliable, it won't happen. I've had the same $30 Netgear router I've had for 5 years without any issues. My Belkin wireless router can't go a day without being unreliable. The Mac Mini had a hard time connecting to web-sites until we switched from wireless to LAN.
When you need 100% uptime you can go with a $30 router or spend significantly more than that for a wireless router and network card that won't ever drop your connection.
I'll keep my wires thank you very much.
Work Safe Porn
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
why is this modded 0? i was thinking the exact same thing.
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
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I think that the author is suggesting that each device will have it's own address (IPv6) and will be connected to the internet directly (possibly VIA shared modem, but with unique addresses). Sure you might only have one pipe coming into your house, but each device has a direct connection to the internet.
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.
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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.
...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.
Yes, of course ! How do you think that they'll enforce even more stupid forms of DRM (that will force RMS to counter writing even more complex versions of GPL) ?
And how do you think that de government will spy on you, using the RFID tag reader in your fridge and fine you if you don't buy the mandatory 10% corn-based products required by some law that some lobby pushed ?
In 10 years, even tinfoil hats will be network-enabled.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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
If you read the article carefully, you will find that the wacky statements about the LAN disappearing came from Robert Whiteley, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., not Bob Metcalfe. The article's writer, Lamont Wood, pieced his story together from many sources. So, as you have stated, it is instead Mr. Whiteley who has "lost it".
You are correct that the article seems to confuse "wireless" with "WAN" and erroneously uses the phrases interchangeably.
A WAN connection by itself will never be more secure than a LAN hooked to a WAN, and a wireless connection will never be more reliable than a wired connection, all things being equal.
...I seriously question the authors assumption that LANs as we know them will cease to exist. Indeed, this is often the problem with "visionaries". They have no real sense for the reality of the situation. It's like the quote supposedly from Steve Jobs at the private Segway unveiling: "Cities of the future will be built around this". This is a classic "visionary" statement. The same exact thing from a realistic (i.e. engineer's) point of view is: "Cities would have to be rebuilt before this thing would be particularly useful".With regard to networks, it's basically inarguable that the many network-enabled devices in people's homes will be sharing a single pipe from an ISP. It is also essentially inarguable that (for the foreseeable future) Ethernet will remain the common hard-wire standard for network connections. Multiple Ethernet connections will require some sort of switching hub to manage the traffic into and out of the shared internet connection, as well as between the various devices. Wireless will likewise still require some sort of central access point. So where, exactly, does this "visionary" genius see the change happening? This is already what we have now, and there's no real reason to change it. Is it a veiled reference to IPv6? Is he simply saying that NAT is going to become superfluous and that somehow that means the same as "the LAN will disappear"? Is he really claiming that no one will firewall their home devices at their [cablemodem/DSL/FiOS] connection, and will choose to allow anyone on their subnet to come browse their shares? Seriously, the internet is a great tool for mass communication, but this ain't no hippy commune. Anyone with enough sense to come in out of the rain is going to want to separate their stuff from the rabble outside. And if so, how is that--- a set of IP addresses behind a firewall--- not basically a LAN?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
One of the problems with placing firewalls directly on the devices instead of in a router or something somewhere is that defect in the devices aren't apparent until after they have been successfully exploited. More public Internet addresses means more problems in the end. Your actually doing yourself a favor by hiding hardware that doesn't need to be directly accessible from the internet in a subnet behind another device. There has been more then one virus that effected/infected the OS or services running on the OS that a simple router would have mitigated.
I don't expect problems like that to go away anytime within the next 10 years. I can see the effects and probabilities mitigated but not removed. A software firewall hasn't always been the best approach either. Sometimes it would crash the system, in situations like with symantec, the firewall itself could be exploited, and so on. Imagine if everyone did a flood attack or actually had a back door into your devices for years/months before it was noticed and patched.
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..
It does help to keep the bad guys guessing about your layout. Do you have 1 desktop, or a 100 servers? With NAT, they don't know. Makes a difference when deciding where to attack.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user