On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 09:52:51AM -0700, Ole Jacobsen wrote:
Much as I understand the moral outrage that NATs cause in some people's
mind, NATs are still a reality AND they (usually anyway) provide
connectivity to the Internet. Have you tried using a hotelroom Ethernet
port or a WiFi network recently? I can't remember the last time I was
assigned something that looked like a "real" routable IP address, but
as a consumer of paid-for Internet service (that works) is there any
reason (apart from religion) that I should care??
That's currently a consequence of the shortage of IP addresses.
With IPv4 not every hotel or restaurant can have a Class-C address
range. Unfortunately, this shortage doesn't make people ask for
IPv6, but makes them getting used to have such NATs, and even
more, it appears to be an advantage, because it gives kind of
protection to unprotected windows machines. Internet is becoming
decadent.
However, such a service might be sufficient as long as you just
poll your e-mail or visit the web from your hotel room. Would you
be happy with it at home? What if you need an open port?
What if you want to receive multicast packages? What if you want
to contact someone else who also has a NAT provider? What if
you want to receive instant messages, e-mail notifications,
peer-to-peer services?
With such providers Internet is not anymore what it used and was
supposed to be. Internet means (at least in my opinion) that in
principle every node can comunicate with every other node.
Clients behind NAT can't communicate with other such clients.
Internet is split into clients and servers, where clients can
communicate with servers only. No peer to peer anymore.
Do we consider this as "internet"?
Hadmut
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf