Daniel Senie wrote: <big SNIP>
> Ad-hoc networks are another similar case, where two machines > are connected via ad-hoc wireless, bluetooth, firewire, > or similar. I'd think it might be useful to be able to > serve web pages between two laptops on a train without > requiring a naming service to be present. Perhaps that won't > be an issue in the brave new world. Your naming service will probably be of the broadcast kind In any other way do you like remembering and typing over 128bit addresses?? :) Most OS's require a (unique) hostname to be entered/automatically generated on install to identify the host to the rest of the system/network/users. This note can also be used to identify it over your file sharing protocol. SMB/CIFS comes with it's own version for example. Most Gnutella/* I don't know what filesharing protocols also have a naming system based on the users login name etc. Heck even your bluetooth cellphone nicely announces it's name + address around the room when you accidentally forget to turn it off. Last weekend some unnamed person was even spamming all the people at the national ISP Karting competition over bluetooth. Good guess to try and spam there as most ISP people are fond of geek tools but also forget to turn their toys off/protect them :) > It just seems to me there is some utility in having this > capability (and others must have thought so since we have > an RFC describing the formatting). Let's think hard before > deciding we are sure there are no useful cases left. Ofcourse there is a need for this, but like SL there are some ways of solving the current ways of doing it. Better clean up now than be sorry in the end. Eg alcatel adsl modems have a web&telnet-interface for configuring them, then again being a SOHO product it should be capable of autoconfiguration. One thing that's for sure is that you can't use two of those devices in the same network as the IP's will always be 10.0.0.138 with no other way to change it than by serial or the network. As we did invent DAD there is no such 'defacto' IP for those boxes to configure themselves with any more... We could use ping6 ff02::1%eth0, but tell that to a homeuser... Greets, Jeroen