www.zeroconf.org
The charter of the Zeroconf Working Group is to enable Zero Configuration IP Networking. That means making it possible to take two laptop computers, and connect them with a crossover Ethernet cable, and have them communicate usefully using IP, without needing a man in a white lab coat to set it all up for you. We're not limiting the network to just two hosts, but we want to take that as the starting point. If you take a group of Macs and plug them into an Ethernet hub, then you have a working AppleTalk network without any expert intervention, and without needing to set up special servers like a DHCP server or a DNS server.
On Windows PCs, Microsoft NETBIOS provides a similar ease-of-use for small networks. One major problem with this situation is that it requires application developers to support one protocol for wide-area communication and a different protocol for local communication. For example, a game developer writing a multi-player game will usually support IP to allow game-play across the Internet. A developer selling a game for $50 doesn't have the technical support budget to provide telephone support for people trying to configure their own "Net 10" IP network at home, so for the sake of ease-of-use, that developer also has to support AppleTalk (in the Macintosh version) and NETBIOS (in the Windows version). Unfortunately, even after doing all that work they haven't really solved their problem, because if someone with a Mac laptop wants to play a network game with their friend who has a Windows laptop, they are still in the position of having to set up their own IP network, because IP is the only cross-platform protocol their two machines have in common. Network printer vendors have the same multi-protocol support issues. It would be much better if a single common protocol worked in all environments. To achieve this small-network functionality in IP, there are four main areas of work: * Allocate addresses without a DHCP server. A final requirement is that the solutions in the four areas must coexist gracefully with larger configured networks. Zeroconf protocols MUST NOT cause harm to the network when a Zeroconf machine is plugged into a large network. It is important to understand that the purpose of Zeroconf is not solely to make current personal computer networking easier to use, though this is certainly a useful benefit. The long-term goal of Zeroconf is to enable the creation of entirely new kinds of networked products, products that today would simply not be commercially viable because of the inconvenience and support costs involved in setting up, configuring, and maintaining a network to allow them to operate.
Further Information * 10 Multicast DNS is a proposed way of enabling name-to-address translation and other DNS-like operations in the absence of a conventional DNS server. For platforms that don't already have IPv4LL support built-in, there are various third-party implementations, but they tend to rely on existing libraries which may not be present on all platforms. This version is just 380 lines, and is self-contained and doesn't depend on one of the standard packet capture libraries to make it work. Rendezvous forms the foundation for completing Apple's transition from AppleTalk to all-IP networking. Apple's customers have high expectations for ease of use, and Rendezvous enables Apple to meet those expectations. Apple is providing Rendezvous services beginning in the Jaguar release of the Mac OS X Operating Sytem, and will be using those services aggressively in its own applications.
|
http://csua.com/feed/