Network Computingwww.networkcomputing.com

By Kelly Jackson Higgins
A Giant Sucking Sound?
Will so-called thin clie nts or network computers (NCs) suck the life out of network and server farms when they take off? Gigabit Ethernet switchmakers secretly hope so. Menachem Abraham, president and CEO of Prominet, says the skinny on thin clients is that they will sap server farms to the extent that traditional 100-Mbps Ethernet networks may not be fast enough. That means server farms will turn to Gigabit Ethernet switches, he says. Industry analysts say a gigabit of bandwidth may make sense for server farms, but not for the entire network. John McConnell, president of McConnell Consulting, says you need gigabit speeds only when there's a long and heavy bandwidth demand, like during a videoconference.

Most users of thin clients likely will be doing word processing or browsing, and that won't create much of a traffic jam, agrees David Passmore, president of Decisys, especially since Java applets can be cached locally and users won't need to keep p ulling them from the server.

Getting In Sync
The pressure is on. The two protocols that play a major role in IP addressing, Domain Name System (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), don't exactly work in sync. Now that big companies with thousands of IP addresses are automating the way they hand out and manage those addresses, it just doesn't make sense to segregate their DNS servers--which map IP addresses to more fathomable names--and emerging DHCP servers--which automatically assign IP addresses to requesting devices. IP address management software makers like American Internet, Bay Networks and Quadritek Systems have added proprietary interfaces between DNS and DHCP, so that when a computer joins the network, the DNS server is updated as well. But the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is under pressure to come up with a real standard. First one working g roup must solidify the next-generation DNS, Dynamic DNS. Then another working group must find a way to bridge Dynamic DNS and DCHP, a process which also is under way at the IETF.

American Internet, meanwhile, is working on a way for multiple DHCP servers to share information if one were to crash. That's a sore spot for businesses that worry that if one of their locally based IP address servers were to fail, much of the company's IP brain trust would be out of order, too.