On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 1:44 PM, Måns Nilsson <mansaxel@besserwisser.org> wrote:
You have successfully demonstrated that users will need some locating service. More so with the cure-all IPv6; because remembering hex is hard for People(tm).
but it's not just hex. Even today you (if given a bare ipv4 address) would need some naming/locating service I suspect. Folk can barely remember their email address, nevermind the hostname of their printer/etc for remote use. Today we 'win' because there's some third-party aggregating 'your device' and 'you' and connecting them together 'properly'.
You have, however, not shown that all the possible ways of building a locating service that become available once the end-points are uniquely reachable (and thus, as long as we're OK with finding just the right host, identifyable) present an equal level of suckage.
sure, I wasn't really trying to accomplish that, just to point out that: you still have to find me in the haystack! and 'well then put dns records in your domain' isn't an answer for 99.99+% of users. Even if Owen's swag of 'thousands' of users 'use ssh' is on target there are ~100m users in the US on cable/dsl plant... (so with 10 ssh users ~.01%) that will basically never 'get it'.
I believe that while the work indeed can be daunting for a sufficiently pessimal selection of users, the situation so improves (if we look at simplicity of protocol design and resulting fragility) when the end-points can ignore any middleboxes that the net result, measured as inconvenicence imposed on a standard End User, will improve.
I bet we end up with the same rendezvous services though... perhaps we wont have to worry about the 'printer' making a long-term (or even periodic?) connection to that service, but I imagine there'll still be some service complexity. It may be better than the current situation, but that's still to be seen.