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Intel Hardware

Intel Whitepaper On UPnP 28

Posted by timothy from the play-more-pray-more dept.
An anonymous reader writes "This article by two developers at Intel provides an introduction and overview to Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), a standards-based technology for transparent network device connectivity that allows devices from various vendors to "just work" when plugged into the network, eliminating the administrative hassle typically associated with networking devices and making them programmable entities that can be controlled across the network. Intel has been a strong supporter of UPnP, and has released an open-source SDK for the development of Linux-based UPnP devices, hosted at SourceForge, which has been used in a number of UPnP products that will soon show up on the market."
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Intel Whitepaper On UPnP More

Intel Whitepaper On UPnP

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  • Vs. Zeroconf? (Score:2, Informative)

    by TheRoss ( 28211 )
    Has anyone posted a detailed comparison of UPnP and Zeroconf/Rendevous? They seem to accomplish similar things.

    Please reply to this comment with any links.
    • Zeroconf is a much larger beast. What you can compare is SLP (Service location protocol) www.openslp.org and UPnP (?). zeroconf gathers all the small details for ip/dns issues so that ip/dns(local) networking can "just work". SLP is what apple uses for itunes & and their IM so you can find anyone on your own subnet using the same program (or service), it's an service location protocol ;)

      Microsoft didn't like SLP for a number of reasons, although i can't find the URL to the guy who designed uPnP for mic
      • Zeroconf is a much larger beast.

        Larger? Hmm, in ascii sort order I suppose it is.

        What you can compare is SLP (Service location protocol) www.openslp.org and UPnP (?).

        Perhaps an interesting comparison. But useless if you wanted to talk about zeroconf.

        zeroconf gathers all the small details for ip/dns issues so that ip/dns(local) networking can "just work".

        Yup, that's 2/3rds of zeroconf. At last year's Apple developer conference, Stuart Chesire talked about zeroconf as encompassing 3 areas: addressin
        • Actually, at least on the MS side, UPnP is also a bunch of smart guys "scratching an itch". They're just scratching different itches: the zeroconf guys are working on making attachment to the network transparent to the user, the UPnP guys are working on providing transparent access to the resources on that network. The two systems together attempt to extend the stack stack which allows a user to plug in his 802.11b card (802.11b), quickly connect to a network (TCP/IP) and get an IP address (zeroconf), and

  • Security? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by semaj ( 172655 ) on Saturday June 07, 2003 @06:49PM (#6140396) Journal
    These systems (Rendezvous, UPnP, etc.) seem to neglect one issue that's important to me personally.

    If I plug something in to my network, I want to know exactly what it's doing and what it's not. Unless I tell it otherwise I want it to sit there and do absolutely nothing. Am I missing something here? The last thing I can imagine being useful is for "intelligent" devices to start making decisions about what they think I want them to do.

    • Re:Security? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bmetzler ( 12546 ) *
      If I plug something in to my network, I want to know exactly what it's doing and what it's not.

      You seem to think that everyone wants, or should want, what, and only what you want. It's not true, people have diverse needs.

      If you want your devices to just sit there dumbly, that's fine, turn uPnP off. But for the rest of us, it makes administration easy when things "just work."

      If accounting needs a new printer, it is nice for me if I don't need to touch all 60 computers in accounting when I plug the p

      • You seem to think that everyone wants, or should want, what, and only what you want. It's not true, people have diverse needs.

        I said: "These systems (Rendezvous, UPnP, etc.) seem to neglect one issue that's important to me personally.". How is that "thinking that everyone wants"?
        • I said: "These systems (Rendezvous, UPnP, etc.) seem to neglect one issue that's important to me personally.".

          But that doesn't make sense. If it is just important to you personally, then why bother being interested in it. Just never use it. You seem to think it problematic, but that "problem" would affect everyone.

          -Brent
    • haha yeah, right. you're making an arbitrary distinction.

      do you have your browser pop up a dialog box every time it accepts a cookie?
  • Good one on the part of Intel with comming out with a SDK for linux as well for other platforms. This is exactly the sort of stuff we need to see more often from major companies. It helps to keep linux up to date from the people who make this stuff, not having the end users rely on people to hack apart the specs themselves and write drivers from scratch. Good one Intel.
  • Intel has done two things wrong with this: 1) Reinventing the wheel. Zeroconf is already there, and open-source too. You'd think that with a "universal" standard, you'd at least want to go with what's already there. 2) Trying to shove on Apple again. This time, it's going to be harder though, because Zeroconf already is supported on many devices and applications, including the TiVo. Another reason to just use Zeroconf.
    • Does anybody have dates corresponding to various milestones of UPnP and Zeroconf. I heard of UPnP before I heard of Zeroconf. However, it's gone a long time without many products that I have seen.

  • Hey Mike (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by MerlynEmrys67 ( 583469 )
    Wonder if you realize you used to work for me Mr. Jeronimo...

    Glad to see you have survived at Intel, and are having fun toys to play with still... I prefer faster technologies than generally make it home

  • UPnP.... another wintel "standard" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SkewlD00d ( 314017 ) on Sunday June 08, 2003 @04:08AM (#6142034)
    Considering the source: M$FT/intel... how likely is it to be a patent/royalty-free "open" standard? Who's on the technical committee? I love it when win/tel secretly develop a standard in a black-box environment, then get ISO/IEEE to rubber-stamp it. You get good things like DDE/DDX, OLE, OLE2, ATL, COM, ActiveX, and VBS. Well, I guess Sun is guilty for that too, w/ Java.

    "All your desktop are belong to Gate$."
  • UPnP: providing remote administration [microsoft.com] to Windows XP since 2001.
  • This is a pretty "new" technology. There is not that many resources/ user group about it.
    I have a Microsoft wireless router (MN-500) and it supports UPNP.
    I started looking into it and it looks like there are a few cool COM objects that can be used in conjunctions with Advanced XML namespaces to do intersting things programatically.
    I wonder what kind of security they put into it ...?
    One of the feature/use of UPNP is to traverse and handle NAT properly.
    The thing that really bug me, is that they keep adding MM
  • On http://www.microsoft.com/WINDOWSXP/pro/techinfo/pl anning/networking/nattraversal.asp [microsoft.com] there is a rather interesting article explaining the basics & problems associated with NAT. For beginners. At the end they explain the Windows API for UPnP.

    The list with Limitations of NAT Traversal is funny, were it not that this will open a cornucopia of new virus possibilities. NAT Traversal is one of the possible solutions in a UPnP device:
    NAT Traversal technology has been created to enable network applic

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