Subject: Re: Zeroconf and UPnP

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 15:18:33 +0200

venkatesh,

In the UPnP standard a reference exist to AutoIP and an old internet draft 
of Zeroconf link-local addressing.
The expectation is that a reference to the future link-local RFC will be 
put in the UPnP
dependent on thoughts on AutoIP and contents of draft.

greetings

peter

Peter van der Stok                Philips Research Laboratories Eindhoven
Bldg: WDC 3-041                  Prof. Holstlaan 4
Phone: +31 40 2742649       5656 AA Eindhoven
Fax:      +31 40 2786516       The Netherlands
Mailto: Peter.van.der.Stok@ philips.com

Erik Guttman <[email-masked]>
Sent by: [email-masked]
18-07-2002 15:13

        To:     Venkatesh Raju <[email-masked]>
        cc:     [email-masked]
(bcc: Peter van der Stok/EHV/RESEARCH/PHILIPS)
        Subject:        Re: Zeroconf and UPnP
        Classification: 

Venkatesh,

On Wed, 17 Jul 2002, Venkatesh Raju wrote:
>                I'm curious about the relationship between the Zeroconf 
working
> group and the UPnP forum.  While I've not studied the drafts extensively 
it
> appears that both are addressing the same problems and in the same 
spaces.
> If this topic has been discussed below I apologize for bringing it up 
again;
> a pointer to the previous thread would be appreciated!

The zeroconf working group is a working group of the ietf.
See www.ietf.org.

The UPnP forum is an industry consortium.
See www.upnp.org.

These two organizations have no official relationship. 

Erik Guttman
ZEROCONF cochair

---

From: "Venkatesh Raju" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 21:50:10 -0700

Thanks for the response.  I had come to a similar conclusion on rendezvous,
i.e. an appletalk replacement and not a full-fledged service architecture
like UPnP.

I've had the opportunity to carefully compare both architectures in the past
week.  With UPnP supporting the IETF link-local address allocation scheme
there's atleast a common ground at the lowest level. The differences clearly
start above this - with zeroconf adding a name-address translation layer
(with mDNS) and a service layer that is still being debated (SLPv2 vs
DNS-SD). I think UPnP's service architecture, based on HTTP, SOAP and XML,
holds promise although it was released prematurely before security issues
were addressed.

Venky Raju
System Architect, Wireless Core Technology
Nortel Networks, Santa Clara, CA

-----Original Message-----
From: Stuart Cheshire [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Tuesday, July 30, 2002 9:09 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: RE: Zeroconf and UPnP

I apologise for my delay in participating in the mailing list 
discussions, but we've been very busy recently at Apple finishing up Mac 
OS X 10.2. I owe people answers to some of the good questions that have 
been raised, and I will try to do that now.

>I guess I'll rephrase my question in a different way: if I were
>developing say a printer, home router, or other peripheral, would
>I implement UPnP or zeroconf?

Apple's interest in Zeroconf is as a way to retire AppleTalk.

Many of the people working on Zeroconf and UPnP may have similar overall 
goals, but Apple believes that UPnP is overcomplicated and harder for 
device vendors to implement.

Hence, Apple has decided to adopt (i) Zeroconf link-local address 
assigment, (ii) Multicast DNS and (iii) NIAS DNS Service Discovery as its 
protocol suite to meet the ease-of-use expectations of our customers, and 
thereby allow AppleTalk to be phased out. Apple's name for this 
initiative is "Rendezvous".

If you were developing a network printer last year and wanted to sell
it to Mac customers, you needed to implement AppleTalk on that printer.

If you are developing a network printer today and want to sell it to Mac 
customers, you would be much better advised to implement Rendezvous 
instead, because it is a lot less work than AppleTalk and works a lot 
better.

Having implemented Rendezvous in your printer, Apple has software we can 
provide to you to enable to you easily discover your device and use it on 
Mac OS 9, Linux, Windows, etc. You are not dependent on waiting for 
Microsoft to support this -- the necessary parts can be easily 
implemented as user-level application code. Indeed, the AirPort Base 
Station configuration software for Windows does exactly this already to 
discover and communicate with AirPort Base Stations on the network.

None of this has any bearing on whether you decide to put UPnP into your 
device as well. View Rendezvous as an alternative to having to put a 
whole AppleTalk stack in your printer, which is a big win in itself. If, 
having done that, you decide that simply running a Rendezvous client on 
Windows meets all your needs, then perhaps you can also save yourself 
having to put the whole UPnP (and/or UPnP 2) implementation into your 
device too -- but that's a decision for each vendor to make individually.

Stuart Cheshire <[email-masked]>
 * Wizard Without Portfolio, Apple Computer
 * Chairman, IETF ZEROCONF
 * www.stuartcheshire.org