Zero Configuration Networking: The Definitive Guide

Preface

Two laptop computers sit less than two feet away from each other. They are so close they are nearly touching—and yet, until recently, as far as network communication is concerned, they may as well have been a thousand miles apart. Surely, communicating with a computer in the same room shouldn’t have to be as hard as communicating with one on the other side of the planet? Our modern l6aptop computers bristle with an astounding array of communications technologies—Ethernet, 802.11 wireless, FireWire, USB, Infrared, Bluetooth, and so on—yet to move a file between two computers two feet apart, 99% of computer users still use physical media. They copy the file onto a floppy disk, burn the file onto a CD, or copy the file onto a USB flash-memory drive. For the 1% who do manage to move the file using networking, most do so by emailing it from one computer to another, which sometimes entails the file traveling to another continent and back, just to move two feet. To do that, the file has to traverse the slow connection to the global Internet and back, at a speed typically a thousand times slower than local Ethernet. Furthermore, a vast infrastructure of services—DHCP, DNS, IP routers, SMTP relays, email servers, etc.—all have to be working perfectly for the transfer via email to succeed. If the DSL line is down, why should that stop two computers sitting next to each other from communicating?

For computer novices, the situation is puzzling and frustrating. If you can see both computers, ...