from some of the discussion, esp. yesterday, i had thoughts of deriving an
anti-NAT polemic and posting it. i planned on mentioning all of the other
brain-dead, obsolete technologies "we" (IP) had in the past ignored, and how
we had triumphed while they had died off.
i was thinking of things like IBM mainframes, BSC, SDLC, and ultimately got
around to thinking of things "in our community" such as UUCP over asynch
(mostly) phone lines, etc.
but as i thought of it, i realized that what "we" successfully ignored in the
past were things that had little use (the ISO acronym popped up in my mind).
things that were heavily used, we somehow brought into the fold and, in some
sense, stepped on their shoulders on our way to "the world of greater
connectivity".
the examples are numerous, and happened in different ways. "we" invented ways
of interconnecting (at least at the level of e-mail, the killer app of the
80s) with IBM mainframes, VMS boxes, etc.
we ran IP over BSC and SDLC.
we invented MX records, as well as bizarre addressing formats (!%.etc.), to
interconnect between the SMTP world and the UUCP world.
i guess if i think anything about all that, it is that if NATs are ubiquitous,
we should figure out how to deal with them. and, that (hopefully), we will
achieve the "greater interconnectivity" on top of, and to some extent in spite
of NATs.
cheers, Greg Minshall