Re: [MLUG] Mac OS X Rendezvous now available for Linux, Windows

[Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I haven't actually triend Rendezvous but from the way it sounds it's a 
good idea long overdo. I don't know why every service on your network 
couldn't be found this easily. I use a similar technique for 
auto-scanning my network for available NFS and SMB shares and it's 
amazing how much easier it is than having to manually configure those. 
Of course Windows always has been able to do this with these shares but 
it was never especially easy in practice. I suppose it'd be just as 
easy, and just as handy, to have a program that could tell you which 
local machines had ssh, ftp, http, etc services available. Does 
Rendezvous find all those things or does it only look for Mac-centric 
services?

My only real issues with such things is A) I want the ability to 
manually configure stuff if I have some reason for doing so and B) it 
could be something of a security issue by so clearly exposing everything 
on your network. The later isn't that big of a problem because and admin 
could see what was available too and do a 'Oh shit I better go turn that 
off.' before anyone else got a chance to do bad things.

Security is something of a problem though because the stronger your 
security the more you have to configure. Say, if you had a firewall 
between each machine limiting who could connect to what on each machine. 
Well.. then if you want to allow a new machine to connect you'll have to 
give it permission to do so in some way. And most likely it'd have to 
give you permission to respond back to it. Then when it comes to having 
passwords on services and such then again someone has to give new users 
access and assign them a password and convey that password to them. I 
guess that's why I advocate a single unique fingerprint per user that'd 
work anywhere from anywhere. You'd logon to a local machine once and 
provide your unique fingerprint code and then each service locally or on 
the lan or on the Net that wanted to verify you would talk to your agent 
on your local machine and would receive a unique hash of your 
fingerprint and the salt they provided. That way you'd only have one 
code to need to remember and would only have to enter it once per 
computing session and it'd cover everything. And you'd not need any 
central service like Passport. Ideally you could provide your 
fingerprint code through some sort of smartcard or biometric device so 
that you wouldn't even need to remember anything. I think the OS that 
conquers making this universal logon work right will definately gain 
market share. For business users especially it'd make life much easier.

>So one of the cooler things about Mac OS X is that you can just plug
>into a network (often wirelessly) and if you are allowed to, discover
>and use all of the potentially interesting resources lying around your
>subnet (printers, iTunes servers, etc.).  This ability, called
>"Rendezvous" for marketing reasons, is really just an implementation
>of the zeroconf protocol.  In theory, anybody else could do this, too.
>
>Or, you could just wait for Apple to write the code for you and
>release it as Open Source:
>
>http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/rendezvous/
>
>Frankly, I'm a bit surprised they did this, but I guess it adds value
>for some of their potential clients, so there you go.
>  
>

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