4 ms·

LANs are broken. Why is it that we have usable tools for connecting halfway round the world, but find it massively hard to coordinate ourselves across a small o

by ktizo 15y ago

LANs are broken. Why is it that we have usable tools for connecting halfway round the world, but find it massively hard to coordinate ourselves across a small office when the internet is down. It is total madness.

augustl 15y ago
I guess it's just about familiarity. We do have the tools (mdns/avahi/bonjour, tcp/netcat, ...). But the internet is usually up, so we don't need to learn how to set up our own local servers, and there's no punishment for transmitting a file across the atlantic when it could have been transferred to another room in the same building and back again.
- ktizo 15y ago
  The fact that there is not persistent caching of mission dependent code and data as a fundamental commercial standard shows how badly we as a species in general can judge risk, even when the stakes are really high.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    How so? Each git user has a local copy of the whole repository.
    - ktizo 15y ago
      Git is not a fundamental commercial standard, I was winging about the state of industry in general.
eropple 15y ago
We...don't? I mean, if you're reliant on cloud services, yeah, you'll have problems--that's obvious. But if you self-host your important stuff (I run my own redmine instance off a local machine) and know how to use SSH, you should be fine in the majority of cases where the LAN is fine but has no Internet access. There's nothing "broken" here.
- ktizo 15y ago
  It seems so. I freelance, so have to jump into various different offices. And on the whole, a hell of a lot of small companies that shouldn't need to be that net-dependent seem crippled these days if their net connection is being flaky.
mikeash 15y ago
99.9% of the time, tools which work for communicating over the internet work very well for communicating locally. It's not worthwhile for most people to devote the time to building, maintaining, or learning a second tool for the LAN side for that 0.1% of the time when your internet connection is down.
- ktizo 15y ago
  True, but they are rarely set up properly. Also, when they are set up they are often only used for things that are thought of as 'local tasks' such as a media store or printer server and not for replication of the online system that you have for some insane reason decided should be hosting your accounts or whatever.

by ktizo 15y ago

augustl 15y ago

I guess it's just about familiarity. We do have the tools (mdns/avahi/bonjour, tcp/netcat, ...). But the internet is usually up, so we don't need to learn how to set up our own local servers, and there's no punishment for transmitting a file across the atlantic when it could have been transferred to another room in the same building and back again.

ktizo 15y ago
The fact that there is not persistent caching of mission dependent code and data as a fundamental commercial standard shows how badly we as a species in general can judge risk, even when the stakes are really high.
- icebraining 15y ago
  How so? Each git user has a local copy of the whole repository.
  - ktizo 15y ago
    Git is not a fundamental commercial standard, I was winging about the state of industry in general.

eropple 15y ago

We...don't? I mean, if you're reliant on cloud services, yeah, you'll have problems--that's obvious. But if you self-host your important stuff (I run my own redmine instance off a local machine) and know how to use SSH, you should be fine in the majority of cases where the LAN is fine but has no Internet access. There's nothing "broken" here.

ktizo 15y ago
It seems so. I freelance, so have to jump into various different offices. And on the whole, a hell of a lot of small companies that shouldn't need to be that net-dependent seem crippled these days if their net connection is being flaky.

mikeash 15y ago

99.9% of the time, tools which work for communicating over the internet work very well for communicating locally. It's not worthwhile for most people to devote the time to building, maintaining, or learning a second tool for the LAN side for that 0.1% of the time when your internet connection is down.

ktizo 15y ago
True, but they are rarely set up properly. Also, when they are set up they are often only used for things that are thought of as 'local tasks' such as a media store or printer server and not for replication of the online system that you have for some insane reason decided should be hosting your accounts or whatever.