On Mon, Aug 06, 2012 at 10:17:34AM -0400, Ted Lemon wrote: > Here you are definitely arguing about the wrong problem. At the > presentation layer, both are equivalent, and both are wrong. What we > want is not fridge-1.local and fridge-2.local, but fridge (here) and > fridge (there).
If you want access to fridge (there), then fridge (there) has to have a globally-addressable domain name. If it doesn't have one, then there's no way for you to reach it, and I can't think of any reason for a well-designed UI to display it. If "fridge.local" is available, then it must be fridge (here). As I see it, those who have devices that they wish to reach remotely will have to either own their own domain names, or acquire delegated subdomains from e.g. their ISP or their hardware vendor (I could see Apple including one in the price of an Airport Express, for example). If your network is configured with such a name, and if you have a printer configured to allow remote access, then the name it advertises and which your UI will cache will be something like "printer-2.my-personal-domain.com" or "printer-3.smithfamily1137.mac.com". I think we have general consensus in the WG that this is a good approach for remote access. So now we're just talking about people who *don't* choose to have their devices remotely accessible; those people's devices would use non-globally- addressable names. Now (as I understand it) the primary advantage to using ".<ULA>" or ".<ULA>.local" naming is the ability to cache separate lists of discovered devices for different networks that you happen to visit. That is, if I'm visiting Ted's house, I'd like to see the list of devices I've previously found on Ted's network, and if I'm at home, I'd like to see the list of devices on mine. But I don't see a requirement for a network name to be globally unique if it isn't globally addressable. I could simply *choose* a name to disambiguate my network from Ted's, just as most of us choose our own SSIDs. You'd want to choose one unique enough that you wouldn't run into duplicates very frequently, but that would be at most a recommendation, not a requirement. So let's say my house uses names in the "evanshouse.local" namespace. For most visitors, this is sufficient to separate things out. If a visitor happens to have the same network name as I do, then my devices and theirs could get mixed up in their lists of cached names, and that's suboptimal and inconvenient, but not (as far as I can see) particularly harmful. If I buy a new router, it will ask me what network name to use, and I will easily remember that I've been using "evanshouse". There's no need to look up the hexadecimal gibberish supplied by my previous router. If I absolutely refuse to give my router a network name, then it could choose one for me, and in that event a ULA-style name seems like a good choice. But I would expect it to be a rare one. -- Evan Hunt -- [email protected] Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. _______________________________________________ homenet mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/homenet
