In the real world of service providers and customers, people don't "choose to be the authors". To choose, they would have to know the options. If I were to randomly poll 1000 of our residential customers to ask them about their L2/L3 networks, firewall policies, etc..., they'd have no idea what I was talking about. The majority of our small business customers are in the same situation. The larger businesses with their own IT staff are in a little better shape. The network consultants in the area barely understand these subjects better than their customers. Whether we're talking about Joe Sixpack or John SMB, they pay for a service and expect that service to magically work. They've used phones for years without understanding the PSTN. We gave them cellphones without making them understand RF/LTE/GPRS/etc.... They drive cars every day without the first clue about how internal combustion engines work. Why should data networks be any different? Sure, I'm oversimplifying things, but that's how non-technical people think. They should be able to spend money on cool and/or useful gadgets, connect those gadgets to their networks, and use them. It's tough enough to try and explain why the neighbor's wi-fi parked on channel 8 is an interferer. L2, L3, IPv4/6 and Multicast? Good luck.
From a service provider perspective, I feel we have 2 choices. The first is to spend a lot of time trying to educate our customers on how networks work and how to manage theirs. Personally, I'd rather have my fingernails pulled out. The second, and I feel much less likely to fail, is to spend time developing technology and service offerings to give our customers the easy, spoon-fed experience they're looking for - and charge them for it accordingly.
On Sun, Dec 20, 2015 at 10:06 PM, Keith Medcalf <kmedcalf@dessus.com> wrote:
You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. If people choose to be the authors of their own misfortunes, that is their choice. I know a good many folks who are not members of NANOG yet have multiple separate L2 and L3 networks to keep the "crap" isolated.
-----Original Message----- From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces+kmedcalf=dessus.com@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Mike Hammett Sent: Sunday, 20 December, 2015 20:37 Cc: North American Network Operators Group Subject: Re: Nat
We can't get people to use passwords judiciously (create them at all for WiFi, change them, use more than one, etc.) and now you want them to manage networks?
----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Randy Fischer" <randy.fischer@gmail.com> To: "Mike Hammett" <nanog@ics-il.net> Cc: "North American Network Operators Group" <nanog@nanog.org> Sent: Sunday, December 20, 2015 9:34:16 PM Subject: Re: Nat
On Sun, Dec 20, 2015 at 10:15 PM, Mike Hammett < nanog@ics-il.net > wrote:
Most people couldn't care less and just want the Internet on their device to work.
Well, if the best practice for CPE routers included as a matter of course the subnets "connected to internet", "local only (e.g. IoT)" and "guest network", and if they just worked, then they wouldn't mind that either.
A friend of mine used to refer to this as 'refrigerator consciousness" - he was a gearhead, so it was a pejorative. Instead, I think of it as a design goal.
-Randy Fischer