Re: [homenet] Introduction to draft-ietf-homenet-simple-naming

"David R. Oran" <daveoran@orandom.net> Thu, 31 May 2018 12:08 UTC

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From: "David R. Oran" <daveoran@orandom.net>
To: Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com>
Cc: Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@irif.fr>, Ted Lemon <mellon@fugue.com>, homenet@ietf.org
Date: Thu, 31 May 2018 08:07:59 -0400
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Subject: Re: [homenet] Introduction to draft-ietf-homenet-simple-naming
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On 30 May 2018, at 19:39, Brian E Carpenter wrote:

> On 31/05/2018 08:53, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
>>>     Well, let me invent something. I throw together my network and 
>>> it
>>>     names the printers as printer1 and printer2. Being a stickler,
>>>     I decide to rename them as Printer 1 and Printer 2. I mess 
>>> around
>>>     and find a config file somewhere and manually edit it.
>>
>> Let me rephrase it:
>>
>> « For her birthday, I bought my girlfriend the nice printer she's 
>> been
>>   wanting.  The network named it "Printer7839cf31".  Since I love my
>>   girlfriend, I renamed it to "Mathilda's printer".  Now she can no 
>> longer
>>   print. »
>>
>>> It would be good if you could come up with a real example. This 
>>> isn't
>>> going to happen in practice,
>>
>> (Giggle.)
>
> We'll see. As it says in every good shop: the customer is always 
> right.
>
Apple doesn’t think so and it may at least partially account for the 
fact that their products successfully auto-configure way more frequently 
than those of the competition.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from this example it’s that either 
you don’t allow automatically-named things to change their names, or 
if you provide a user-friendly feature to change the name it “just 
works” and doesn’t break the associated function. I guess this means 
that if you rely on DNS to discover and use names, then you provide an 
update API and not allow “write-behind” to config files (if they 
exist in the first place).

Now, if the name-changing auto-configuration functions are broken, then 
either there has to be a way to diagnose it (maybe only by the people 
who sold you the printer) and a way to revert to the prior 
configuration. That diagnostic function does in my view not have to be 
something easily done by the home user.


DaveO

>     Brian
>
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