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Re: NAT natural example, Re: [midcom] WG scope/deliverables

2001-02-16 10:40:04
At 8:12 AM -0800 2/16/01, Ed Gerck wrote:
1. there is a natural need for heterogeneous address systems and,

Agreed.

2. therefore, there is a natural need for address translation.

Only if there's some need to interconnect them, and even then only as
a temporary measure, if at all, because there is an alternative and
preferable way to deal with heterogeneous address systems -- and the
only long-term successful way if history is any guide -- which is to
layer a homogenous address system on top of them, which is the basic
idea behind IP.

Yes, the first attempt to join networks using different address systems
is often to install translators, which is the way "interworking" was
done before IP and Pup were invented, the way email systems were
interconnected before universal adoption of the foo(_at_)bar(_dot_)baz name 
space,
and the way people are gluing together the phone network and IP phones,
not to mention the IPv4 and IPv6 Internets, today.  Such approaches have
always turned out to be so complex, fragile, unmanageable, unscalable,
and function-limiting that they are sooner or later abandoned in favor
of the one-global-namespace approach.  If people understood that they
didn't "need" to do translation, they just might take that step sooner
and save everyone a lot of grief.

Steve