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0 pointsapi10y ago0 comments

The majority never see IPs at all, in which case this is a non-issue. This is an issue for network people and developers.

All the alternatives are either unreliable and slow (bonjour/mDNS) or require manual setup prior to use. Given that machines, networks, routes, etc. are all becoming increasingly ephemeral in the end all you end up with is a DNS, .ssh/config, or hosts file with hundreds or thousands of stale entries for things that existed for five minutes. In some environments there are nice systems for naming things and IP address management but these are hard to set up and maintain and aren't feasible in really heterogenous settings.

I guess Martin Fowler was right: there are two hard things in CS, cache invalidation and naming things. This is naming things.

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arm10y ago

“All the alternatives are either unreliable and slow (bonjour/mDNS)”

I’ll agree with you on that, in certain cases. In my experience, OS X-to-OS X always works seamlessly, but Windows-to-OS X is much more annoying. It works around 70% of the time.

Say the hostname of the Mac on the local network is lorems-mac-mini.local. Then say I want to connect to this Mac over various services from my Windows computer (file sharing via Windows Explorer, vnc via TightVNC, nx via NoMachine, etc.). 70% of the time, providing lorems-mac-mini.local as the hostname works. The other 30% of the time, the same programs which worked just fine with the hostname as lorems-mac-mini.local all of a sudden won’t be able to find it on the network anymore unless the same hostname is entered without the .local part. Then, sometimes, neither solution works and the Windows computer can’t find the Mac at all unless I enter its IP address, which magically works.

Frankly, it became annoying enough that I now just enter the IP addresses of devices on my local network that I want to connect to now instead of their hostnames, since I know it’ll always work.

…in that sense, I guess I have to agree with your overall sentiment.

uxcn10y ago

> This is an issue for network people and developers.

So, the problems mentioned in the post essentially were...

    * ambiguity specifying ports

    * software not recognizing addresses

    * length to type (3-32+7 characters)

Looking past DNS, the first is only really an issue in web browsers, which I would doubt most people will actually use. The second is arguably a software issue, not a format issue. The third genuinely seems marginally debatable. Still, it seems like the amount of code needed to translate from one format to another would be trivial. In the amount of time it took to write the post, someone could probably have just written the code instead. There are tons of plugin mechanisms for stuff (shell, editor, browser, etc...)..

> Given that machines, networks, routes, etc. are all becoming increasingly ephemeral

MPTCP addresses some of these issues.

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