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

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

On 01/06/2018 00:07, David R. Oran wrote:
> 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.

I'm not sure that's as true as it used to be; my recent experiences with
attaching off-the-shelf printers to another o/s have been positive. However,
that's with very simple network topology.

> 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).

I agree. Without the ability for users to attach names of their choice
(in scripts of their choice) to devices, there will be millions of
unhappy users.

> 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.

Are you sure? The people who sell you printers today operate on very
tight profit margins. In practice, I don't think expert diagnosis is
a realistic expectation.

Regards
    Brian