- Alisa sent me a copy of
Rick's letter about the proposed charter. I read it and thought it was fine, but only today noticed the last line - Vote NO to the charter change on April 1st. Don't let them make a "fool" of you.
Today the BCRC was open for business using the new computers. I wrestled with several issues. I was unable to get a disted image to print properly. Printing would mostly work after deleting and adding a printer (although one printer would only spit out page after page of gibberish when the printer tried to literally print a PDF file. I was completely unable to figure out why the computer thinks the printer can print PDF files). I had deferred dealing with printing head on because we've gotten a new printer and I planned to focus on developing support for that printer, but that printer can't be used yet because we don't have cable to that spot yet. I could move the printer, but then who knows when we could cable pulled in there.
I found lots of error messages in system.log which prompted me to explore turning Rendezvous off. For the uninitiated, Rendezvous is the Apple trademarked name for Zeroconf (a Working Group of the IETF). The idea of Zeroconf is a set of protocols that allow clients to "discover" the services being offered around them and allow the user to access the services, without having to know addresses, etc. Steve Jobs demonstrated some so-called cool technology that involved a computer recognizing when a powerbook came within airport range and adding the music on the powerbook to its own iTunes playlist.
- At Zeroconf, there's a FAQ. One question is about turning off Rendezvous to improve security. They said
- Turning off Rendezvous to improve security is like having a company policy that every employee will be hit in the face with a baseball bat every day when they come to work in the morning, to discourage thieves. All this achieves is to make life unpleasant for the legitimate employees, while the thieves continue to come in through the back door and steal stuff anyway. Initiatives like this may give management the illusion that decisive steps are being taken to combat theft, but it's really just making legitimate employees' lives unpleasant without doing anything to solve the real problem. The correct answer is to lock the doors and windows, not to beat on the innocent employees coming in through the front entrance.
I've heard this kind of rhetoric before. Something like Zeroconf makes sense in an environment disconnected from the rest of the network when you have no systems administrators to provide real servers and services. If you have real servers, you don't need the overhead of running Rendezvous and probably shouldn't be providing services on clients machines.