Reviewer: Charlie Wiseman
Date: 10-20-2005
What is the consensus rating for this paper? top 25%, but not top 10%
How confident are you that the consensus judgement treats the paper fairly? reasonably confident
How would you rate the overall review process for this paper? ok, but uneven
How did the disagreements among the reviewers get resolved? Or if you were unable to reach consensus, what were the main sticking points?
There were few disagreements over the paper. In general, all reviewers liked the paper, and felt that the tool could be used successfully in real networks. During the discussion, a few questions were raised about the portability and usability of such a tool.
Considering portability, the authors say that there is at least one switch chipset (linksys) that both ignores the ethernet RFC and is hard to detect. This combination means that the presented algorithm will fail, as it relies on correct behavior of any switches. It is reasonable, then, that other such devices exist that could make the algorithm fail. However, such devices can't be dealt with specifically because that don't conform to the RFC. There are a few other situations that potentially cause problems, including low-layer firewalls and NATs, and VLANs. In general, though, these problems will be few and far between.
As for usability, there is some contention over exactly where the tool will be useful. In a larger company, there are likely dedicated support staff that already know the network topology. So, this tool would prehaps be useful to remote supporters of smaller businesses and home offices. Then, in order for it to be easily used, there would need to be an easy way to turn on the daemons on all local hosts remotely. Certainly this can be done, but likely requires native system support for the tool and a certain level of trust between users and remote supporters. In such an environment, it seems reasonable that the tool could indeed be useful.