At 11:53 PM 1/20/2001, Keith Moore wrote:
> But complaining about NAT is not a new fad and usage of NAT hasn't been
> stemmed the tiniest bit. We can't keep burying our heads in the sand and
> trying to deny new work on dealing with NAT. It's here, it isn't going away
> and we have to find solutions for applications that need to deal with NAT.
By all means, let's deal with NAT. Let's find better solutions to the
problems that NAT purports to solve - solutions that don't create the
plethora of additional problems that inherently come with NATs.
The only true solution is to not use NAT. Yet it is still being heavily
deployed.
NAT is an architecturally bankrupt strategy - the more you try to fix
it, the more complex the architecture becomes, the harder it becomes to
write and configure applications, and the the more brittle the network
becomes. There is no way to fix the problems created by NAT without
a global name space for points in the network topology, and this is
the thing that NAT fundamentally destroys.
I agree with that, but see no other alternative (other than waiting for
IPv6) than improving communication through NAT piece by piece.
> Work in this area is starting in the new MIDCOM working group. But some
> people are still worried about being politically correct with respect to
> denying the perceived legitimacy of NAT.
That's not political correctness, it's sound engineering.
Academia and closed groups have the luxury of sticking to sound
engineering. The rest of the world is much more complex and we have to deal
with the ugliness of a varied topology Internet.