Blame the last man standing?

I heard that at the O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention, Rendezvous was suspected of causing network problems. Without being there to properly investigate it I can't say if it was Rendezvous or not, but I know you're a big fan of Rendezvous, so I wanted to talk to you about an unfortunate trend I'm seeing. I'm not sure what to do about it -- if you have any thoughts, I'd be glad to hear them.

We frequently see the following pattern:

(a) someone's network is broken
(b) they look with a packet sniffer
(c) all they see is Rendezvous traffic
(d) they conclude that Rendezvous broke their network

The whole point of Rendezvous is that it is the networking that keeps working even when everything else is broken. Of course when your network is broken, and everything else stops working, all that's left is the Rendezvous traffic. Does that mean that Rendezvous broke your network? When all the world's oil reserves are exhausted, and all that's left running on our roads are the electric cars, does that mean that the electric cars caused the world's oil reserves to run out? No, I don't think so. Without actually being there, I can't tell what caused the problem in this case. Maybe it truly was caused by Rendezvous, or maybe it wasn't. We will probably never know now. The point is that just because Rendezvous is the only thing that survives your network outage, doesn't mean that Rendezvous caused your network outage.

See http://oscon.kwiki.org/index.cgi?WirelessProblems

Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. In addition to Foo Camps ("Friends of O'Reilly" Camps, which gave rise to the "un-conference" movement), O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the Web 2.0 Summit, the Web 2.0 Expo, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the Gov 2.0 Summit, and the Gov 2.0 Expo. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar, "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim's long-term vision for his company is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. In addition to O'Reilly Media, Tim is a founder of Safari Books Online, a pioneering subscription service for accessing books online, and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, an early-stage venture firm.

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