Providing Reliability In Home Networks

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Providing Reliability In Home Networks

• Peter Kriens
• CEO aQute
• Technical Director OSGi
• OSGi Fellow

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Contents

• Whats wrong?
• Why is it wrong?
• What can we do about it?

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What?
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The Future of the Past

• Jetsons (sixties)
• Sunny Future, all Jetson had to do at the Spacely
  Sprockets factory was pushing a button
• The 21st Century (1967)
• By Walter Cronkite. Predicting the technologies
  of the year 2001
• A Space Odysee 2001
• A truly intelligent computer, HAL
• Marvin (1997)
• A Personal Assistant Project for Ericsson
  Research
• Smart Homes (2000)

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The Future of Today

• My father recently bought a Personal Video
  Recorder
• He spent 4 days trying to get it connected
• It was connected ..
• But he never used it until I visited him
• It turned out that the PVR could not control the
  satellite decoder
• Decoders were mentioned in the manual though
• Making the PVR virtually useless for him
• Then he also bought DVD-R instead of DVDR discs
  

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The Future of Today

• Connecting a home Cinema system is magic today
• Digital Audio, S-Video, RCA plugs, 5.1, Dolby,
  THS, and all configurable
• We have 6 remote controls
• Have been able to reduce this to 3! After 3 days
  hard work
• My family is puzzled why they can not watch
  another channel on the second TV
• A satellite receiver can only handle a single
  channel
• I have given up on synchronizing my Bluetooth
  phone
• Too much work, too painful

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The Future of Today

• My Router
• About twice a day it looses the external
  connection
• My Printer
• gt 20 pages fail to print
• My GoVideo Networked Music player often can not
  find the music server
• And it only find one of the 3 standard UPnP
  servers on my network
• My PC internal network card fails
• Replaced twice, spent countless hours on support
  calls
• Use a USB key now
• Switched several PCs to fixed IP number
• The automatic number assignment was too unreliable

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Why?
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Jetsons Revisited
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Stupidity of Computers

• Y2K bug
• Too silly to even talk about
• Viruses
• Attack is often to simplistic to fool even a 3
  year old
• Blindly repeating the same mistake
• Preventing user mistakes only with a lot of hard
  work
• It is not the user, it is our fault
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Computers have no common sense

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Human Nature

• Users have very little patience to setup
  computers
• Their primary motivation lies elsewhere
• Lots people think computers are intelligent,
• Which does not reflect well on their IQ
• Eliza, Weizenbaum
• Marketing does not help
• People tend to blame themselves
• Abstractions Impedance Mismatch
• For most people, abstractions are very complex
• For us, they are our bread and butter

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Stupid Computers/Humans

• "On two occasions, I have been asked by members
  of Parliament, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put
  into the machine wrong figures, will the right
  answers come out?' I am not able to rightly
  apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that
  could provoke such a question."-- Charles
  Babbage (1791-1871)

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Configuration and Setup

• Too much flexibility
• Requires too many choices
• Huge gap between the developer and the user
• And marketing check lists
• Security makes it beyond silly
• 10 letter non mnemonic passwords
• Change them every month
• It took the telephone industry 120 years to
  invent covers!!

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Too Much Functionality

• Systems are being made too complex.
• Look at Telephony
• The functionality offered is as simple as it gets
• Connect one number to another number
• 10-18 keys is all you need
• 2 pages explanation
• Still the system complexity is horrendous
• Simple products have manuals that run into the
  hundreds of pages
• Feature Interaction
• Usability

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Stupidity of Programmers

• Software quality is, on average, abominable
• Bad design
• Bad structure
• Bad Coding
• Very redundant
• Most programmers think they can program better
  than the average programmer
• Programmers are often very pedantic
• Very few established best practices
• Mixing too many different technologies
• Testing is too often a tool to create quality,
  not to verify its presence
• Too often going for new (and exciting)
  technologies
• Too little knowledge of existing solutions
• Ignoring lessons of the past
• Coupling
• Cohesion

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Programming is Inhumane

• On June 4, 1996 an unmanned Ariane 5 of 500
  million exploded after lift-off. A 64 bit
  floating point number was converted to a 16 bit
  signed integer, and it was larger than 32,768
• if ((options (__WCLONE__WALL))
  (current-gtuid 0)) retval -EINVAL

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How?
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Simplicity

• Reduce functionality
• Resist feature creep
• Do not add a function because it is easy
• Make it work well (and safe) in all cases
• Reduce setup and configuration
• Make it work out of the box
• Make the life of the user easy, not yours

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Keep It Simple
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Reliability

• We are trying to get away with cheap solutions
• Reliability is not as important as price
• But we pay for support and the consequences of
  the problems
• We have the solutions, why dont we use them
• Redundant hardware
• Distributed Transactions
• Proven Solutions
• Inspections and Reviews
• Root cause analysis

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Learn, Learn, Learn
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But
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Common Sense

• With the current model, programmers will not be
  able to keep up with the complexities raised by
• the application domains
• the development process
• Home networks and computers in general will not
  work until we understand common sense.
• The Artificial Intelligence debacle of the
  sixties is still holding us back but
  breakthroughs must happen in the coming years
• We need more research in this area, much more

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• Peter Kriens
• Mob 33633746480
• Tel [phone]
• Tel [phone]
• 9C, Avenue St. Drézéry, 34160 Beaulieu, France
• AOL,Yahoo, Skype pkriens, ICQ 255570717
• Email Peter.Kriens_at_aQute.biz
• www.aQute.biz