It is time IMO for some at the IETF to stop pretending that the
Internet can made into a
homogeneous network. It wasn't and it won't.
Ip address space will continues to tighten, exponentially increasing
the pain of dealing with such a small number of IPs. Then throw 200
million cell phones with their own IP, and you network everything
in your house, plus all the PDA's and other gadgets coming.
It is a horried idea to start setting up NATs on cell phones,
on PDA's and only god knows what else we be plugged into the net
(I liked the ip addressible coffee machine I saw that you could
telnet into). Do you really want to put and configure a NAT in
your coffee maker?
As the pain of limited IP address space tightens we'll move more
and more to IPv6 and it'll level itself out. While NATs *work*
they are horribly inelegant. I'm very much reminded of the days
when there was a PC limit of 640k RAM, and the manufacturers
places all the video RAM and support stuff above 640k because
"no one would ever need it". This caused huge problems for
years and years as we all fought to get back to an open address
space... if then...we had only just invested in a good design.
As the pain of limited IP space increases, so shall we switch
and NAT's will someday be no more.
The question is, how much will we inflict upon ourselves in the
pursuit of making NAT's work? I hope this time around we
fix the problem earlier....
Kyle Lussier
www.AutoNOC.com