Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs

Falsehood People Believe about Programmers:

Programmers think the models they use are perfect.

This feels like a bastardization of the already questionable "Falsehoods ___ believe about ___" format.

* there is something called a LAN

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

> There is one DHCP server.

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

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.

> My LAN uses IP addresses.

I've never heard of a LAN without IP addresses. Is that a thing? I'd assume that no IP addresses means you can't even use TCP/IP at all, right? Is there something else you'd use instead?

>Two hosts on the same subnet can reach each other without leaving the LAN.

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

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