Re: Time to kill layer 2

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All the way up to the user ? Many times.

On 4/14/16 6:56 PM, Ted Lemon wrote:
> Of course!
> 
> On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 5:54 PM, Dimitri Staessens
> <dimitri.staessens@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> <mailto:dimitri.staessens@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
> 
>     anyone thought of killing everything on top of layer 2?
> 
> 
>     On 04/14/16 14:59, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> 
>         This morning I spent an hour debugging the network to print out two
>         class projects that were due. Some points:
> 
>         1) My ability to debug the network is better than 99% of the
>         population
>         2) The interaction of Bonjour, DHCP and auto power saving is
>         unfortunate
>         3) Things should still work after I have been away for a week
>         4) If vendors want to be selling all that IoT gear, they have to
>         solve
>         these issues.
> 
>         5) I want someone to blame. Right now when the network doesn't
>         work, I
>         don't know who is the cause. I want one point of contact. Whoever is
>         that point of contact will get most of my networking money.
> 
> 
>         One of the biggest headaches in debugging is that 'smart hubs' are
>         not. They are actually very stupid. They make assumptions of network
>         topology that are not true. Another is the unfortunate
>         implementation
>         of DHCP.
> 
>         I don't use SNMP for a simple reason - it is not available to most
>         ordinary people. I want to understand networking for the 99%,
>         not the
>         IETF 1%-ers.
> 
>         All this networking gear is presented to me as black boxes over
>         which
>         I have absolutely no control (which is fine-ish) and no visibility.
> 
>         What we have today is the product of a historical process. I
>         remember
>         the days when Ethernet ran on 10BaseT. But I installed my first
>         switch
>         30 years ago and it has been a switched protocol for 20 years now.
> 
> 
>         It seems to me that there is a business opportunity for any
>         vendor who
>         takes the rather obvious step of simplifying the system.
> 
>         People talk about 'IP everywhere' and 'IP end-to-end' which is
>         rather
>         odd when you think about the fact that virtually every local network
>         uses MAC addresses for routing.
> 
>         One of the reasons that IP won against OSI was that it was simpler.
>         Applications ran on top of the IP layer with only TCP inbetween. Of
>         course these days we do have a Presentation layer, Web Services
>         run on
>         HTTP. But unlike the OSI presentation layer, ours does not introduce
>         extra moving parts.
> 
>         It seems to me that if we really believed in IP everywhere and IP
>         end-to-end we would insist that network switches be IP routers that
>         can be managed using BGP/OSPF or at least routing tables rather than
>         heuristic devices that try to guess where packets should go based on
>         goat entrails, phases of the moon or whatever they use.
> 
> 
>         What should have happened many moons ago was that DHCP should have
>         become a bidirectional protocol or a bootstrap to a bidirectional
>         protocol. So when a printer joins the network, it authenticates and
>         tells the network what it is. And this is all defined in one set of
>         specifications from one organization, none of which assumes that
>         security is an 'advanced', 'optional' or 'enterprise' feature.
> 
>         Instead we have an ad-hoc layer trying to achieve the same result in
>         peer-to-peer fashion. A similar approach works for frogs as a
>         reproductive mechanism but only at the species level. It certainly
>         does not work for the individual ova which may or may not connect to
>         the printer it is trying to use to print the kids damned homework.
> 
> 
>         Seriously, the fact that things have scaled thus far and the 1% can
>         get them to work does not mean that we can get to the next level
>         without a serious rethink of the local network architecture.
> 
>         The type of device I think we need would be first and foremost an IP
>         router. It would have ethernet plugs on the box and use ethernet
>         layer
>         1 specs. But when a another 'True-IP' device was plugged in, it
>         would
>         quickly negotiate a direct IP connection, oh and with proper 64KB
>         packets. It would also, authenticate, announce and turn on link
>         layer
>         encryption.
> 
>         Such a device would also be a legacy router. It would fake all the
>         signals necessary for a legacy ethernet device to function. It would
>         also be responsible for maintaining the local information for the
>         network service database and intercommunicating with other hubs to
>         achieve a global network view.
> 
> 
>         The net result of all this would be that I would never ever need to
>         install another printer (no, it is not actually necessary for every
>         stupid printer to have its own stupid printer driver). Opening the
>         'printers' folder would automatically show every printer that is on
>         the network or can be woken from slumber by the hub it connects to.
> 
> 
> 




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