Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs

(dreamstation.systems)

42 points | by robinpie 1 hour ago

7 comments

  • elaida73 36 minutes ago
    This feels like a bastardization of the already questionable "Falsehoods ___ believe about ___" format.
    • throw0101a 0 minutes ago
      Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Weblog Posts
    • rcxdude 33 minutes ago
      How so? It's pretty within the format IMO.
      • elaida73 11 minutes ago
        Maybe I'm pulling at a fake distinction here but the progenitor blog posts of this format that I'm thinking of were incorrect models of constructs that almost everyone uses in their everyday life constantly ( names, dates, time etc )

        Whereas I find it kinda unlikely that someone both knows what a DHCP server is, and holds a belief that there is only ever exactly one on their network?

    • shric 11 minutes ago
      Falsehoods people believe about the “falsehoods ___ believe about ___ format”…
    • _kb 18 minutes ago
      That format is considered harmful.
  • mitxela 33 minutes ago
    * there is something called a LAN

    * two people who say they are on the same LAN agree on what the LAN is

  • amelius 35 minutes ago
    Falsehood People Believe about Programmers:

    Programmers think the models they use are perfect.

    • judge2020 23 minutes ago
      Mostly programmers think a system will act predictably given the same inputs. Most of computing doesn't work without that assumption.
    • orthogonal_cube 22 minutes ago
      Programmers certainly believe that, but they quickly learn not to.
    • wat10000 27 minutes ago
      I’d say this one is frequently true, and is one of the things that distinguishes senior from junior programmers.
  • ronsor 46 minutes ago
    > There is one DHCP server.

    There'd better be or your network is probably hosed.

    • 0xcde4c3db 0 minutes ago
      What really matters is that there's a coherent policy for assigning addresses, which is absolutely compatible with having multiple DHCP servers on the same subnet (e.g. each server configured to hand out non-overlapping IP ranges).
    • wmf 43 minutes ago
      In theory it's fine to have multiple DHCP servers as long as they don't step on each other. But in reality a bunch of the things mentioned in this post are ways for the network to be hosed. Unfortunately, enough LANs are semi-hosed that it's worth working around known problems.
    • smkelly 35 minutes ago
    • pezezin 31 minutes ago
      At work I manage a network with two DHCP servers. One is a dnsmasq that assigns the IP address, hostname, and basic network parameters to all network devices, and the other is a LTSP server (https://ltsp.org/) that provides network boot images only for certain devices that require it. It might not look pretty, but it works really well.
    • kryogen1c 37 minutes ago
      Windows supports dhcp failover, where multiple dhcp servers can exist on the same subnet.
    • briandw 36 minutes ago
      You don’t have to have one. My first LAN didn’t. I had no idea what I was doing and picked 17.0.0.0 addresses for local ones and I couldn’t connect to Apples website.
    • Hikikomori 40 minutes ago
      That works mostly, you'll have problems if you have duplicate IP addresses though.
  • unethical_ban 28 minutes ago
    I get the idea, but this isn't necessarily useful as advice and toys with definitions. It's ESPN levels of conversation-baiting. Lots of assumptions can be reasonably made about residential LANs without being true of enterprise LANs/DMZs.

    If a residential LAN is RFC1918 and has no NAT, then it is still a LAN... without internet access.

    Then the "A & !A" fallacy of "MAC addresses can’t be changed. MAC addresses can be changed."

    Just kind of a mess. Would be more interesting to explore the edge cases rather than throw out half-truths and 0.05% instances.

    I like the GNOME 2006 era though.

    • aduwah 22 minutes ago
      Read it as chain of thoughts not as a list
  • StilesCrisis 42 minutes ago
    >Two hosts on the same subnet can reach each other without leaving the LAN.

    Barring "very buggy software," when is this false?

    • dipierro 37 minutes ago
      Port- or Client-isolation on Ethernet switches and Wi-Fi access points respectively. Often seen in corporate environments and (properly configured) guest networks.
      • StilesCrisis 20 minutes ago
        I feel like the point of those is conceptually "take these things off the LAN." If we allow for that, what even is a LAN?
    • wmf 34 minutes ago
      There are recent "client isolation" features that prevent P2P communication. Some hosting providers also block customers on the same LAN from attacking each other.
      • jrockway 31 minutes ago
        Indeed. You might share a subnet with other customers of your ISP, but your ISP probably doesn't let you ARP poison them.

        This isn't even that recent. I remember doing ARP poisoning exactly once and then being surprised that it didn't work everywhere.

        I think the falsehood here is that same IPv4 subnet = same link layer network, but that doesn't have to be the case.

        • Hikikomori 22 minutes ago
          Did arp poisoning in school and used a tool to show images from websites people visited on the projector. Teacher thought it was fun until someone went to goatse.
      • jrockway 32 minutes ago
        Indeed. You might share a subnet with other customers of your ISP, but your ISP probably doesn't let you ARP poison them.

        This isn't even that recent. I remember doing ARP poisoning exactly once and then being surprised that it didn't work everywhere.

    • rcxdude 36 minutes ago
      Switches and firewalls can do all kinds of things. Probably the most common case is that public/guest wifi networks often have client isolation set up so that different devices on the network can't contact each other. Same subnet, but only access to the gateway and the internet in practice.

      (Also can happen if ARP is not working correctly, which can be a right PITA to debug).

    • mitxela 31 minutes ago
      LAN spread across sites with a WAN in the middle of it. But that's why I said in my comment that a LAN isn't actually a real thing.
    • justinlivi 36 minutes ago
      I feel like the better of this is maybe "will" instead of "can"
    • Waterluvian 38 minutes ago
      Yeah… I feel like “falsehoods X believe about Y” need to omit anything a reasonable X would consider to be a bug.

      Edit: fair point. Maybe not.

      • rcxdude 32 minutes ago
        I think generally the point of the phrasing is to make you stop considering it a bug,
      • wat10000 29 minutes ago
        Falsehoods programmers believe about programming: you don’t have to work around other people’s bugs.
    • Hikikomori 35 minutes ago
      Some tunnel that extends the subnet somewhere else. Guess it depends on how you define lan.
    • basilikum 38 minutes ago
      VPNs
  • tonetheman 18 minutes ago
    [dead]