Ed, you seem to be ignoring the difference between identification,
location, and routing. What the post office does is routing, not NAT.
The NAT problem is a problem because IP addresses mix the concepts
of identification and location in a single bit string. There's nothing
natural about it, at least nothing more natural than shooting
oneself in the foot.
Brian
Ed Gerck wrote:
"Steven M. Bellovin" wrote:
In message <3A8C196C(_dot_)197E510(_at_)nma(_dot_)com>, Ed Gerck writes:
Actually, in the UK you can do just what you wish ;-)
You give a name to your house (say, "The Tulip") and
the post office knows where The Tulip is. If you move,
you can do the same at your new location, provided
there is no conflict. This seems to be more similar to the
notion of using an IP number as a name -- but isn't this
why we need DNS? ;-)
And if you move from London to Belfast, this will still work?
In the UK, as I said. I would think that other countries may have
a similar system. Note that this is a natural example of NAT,
in which the post office is doing the address translation to a local
address that only that post office knows, but which is globally
reachable through that post office. And the post office does so
without changing the global addresses or the local addresses.
I don't want to be philosophical about this, but IMO this example
actually supports the view that NATs are naturally occuring solutions
to provide for local flexibility without decreasing global connectivity.
The Internet NAT is perhaps less an "invention" than a translation of
an age old mechanism that we see everywhere. We use the same
principle for nicknames in a school for example.
IMO, it is thus artificial to try to block Internet NATs. Far better would be
to define their interoperation with other network components that we also
need to use, in each case.
Cheers,
Ed Gerck