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On 14/01/14 09:53, Philip Hudson wrote: > On 14 January 2014 09:25, Tom <madtom1999@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> And you cant see the downside of that at all? > > > Actually, I can. You see, I've not only used this stuff, I've administered > this stuff. A lot. Didn't say there was no downside, but I do say that for > both the user and the administrator there is no comparison in terms of > getting rid of utterly unproductive, unnecessary, annoying, distracting, > special-knowledge network configuration tasks that are utterly opaque and > unusable to naive, low-skilled users and that require a highly paid > specialist to understand and resolve. (Could *that* be the real appeal of > DHCP?) It's the difference between designing a system that can fail *in > ordinary usage* and one that can't. Like designing a system that can have > either sound or graphics or both either working or not working and still be > considered unbroken, and one that either has them both working or is broken. > > So, yes, NBP's downsides exist. I'll let you have a go at listing what > you've spotted and I'll tell you if you miss anything. But DHCP is still > *rubbish* tech. You're both right and wrong here: DHCP *is* pretty rubbish to be fair, I can't really argue with that. I still wish that there was some kind of equivalent to MX priority for DHCP, as anyone who has ever had more than one DHCP server on the same subnet will also. Managing them is also a bit of a pain in the arse, especially when they're being misused for things like asset management via spreadsheets full of the MAC addresses of the 2000 new Dell desktops being dropped off on Monday. But, networking is hard, especially if you're doing it right. IPv6 will eventually take most of the pain away, when lazy ISPs, hardware manufacturers and the rest of the world finally catches up. The problem is that IPv6 *is* hard: IPv4 is already rocket science to non-computer experts with all of it's gibberish about subnet masking and default routes, and IPv6 is utterly impenetrable to anyone except network and systems administrators. Which is convenient for me :] Where you're so, so very wrong is praising Apple for, of all things, the pile of sh*t that passes for network functionality in their OS. I mean, you're kidding right? I too have done admin for Apple machines, and a lot of it. On your brain-dead 2 or 3 machine, autoconfigured default home 192.168.0.0/24 subnet behind a SOHO NAT router they work fine, if noisily. Usually. On a managed network? Exercise in pure pain. As someone else said, there's a reason why you stick the graphics department's handful of Macs into their own subnet or VLAN, feed a bunch of highly restrictive rules to pf on the OpenBSD router that stops them from destroying themselves and the rest of the network and call it a day. Just like IPX, DecTalk and NetBEUI there is a reason why AppleTalk has gone away and died - because it was hopelessly bad. Bonjour and Zeroconf continue to annoy me to this day unfortunately. In the brave new world of OS X 10.9, aka, Mavericks, Apple are bizarrely incapable of allowing two different subnets to talk to each other over a L2TP VPN if both sides are behind a NAT gateway for example. Please never use the words "Apple" and "networking" in a positive light in the same sentence again. Also note they are finally deprecating their idiotic AFP rubbish in favour of Microsoft's far superior SMB protocol as they've evidently finally realised what a bunch of morons they are. And Apple have broken NFS compatibility between their stupid OS and standard Linux/UNIX boxes than AIX has, and that's really saying something. Not that I'm bitter or anything. There is a reason why I chose "bad apple", and a not insignificant part of it involves networking. Regards -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq