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. > > >