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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.
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... 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.
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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
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'
We call that 'Intranet' nowadays.
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 :)
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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).
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.
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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.
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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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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
...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.