Melinda,
I actually agree with most of what you say in the absolute.
I will note that the one thing going for the home network NAT guys is
that they have focused on making things work to the extent that they
even have George Hamilton selling NATs at the poolside on TV commercials
for Circuit City. They may not take routing transparency seriously
enough, but they seem to have a real market for their products.
The leading NAT gets the follow review on amazon.com:
Average Customer Review: <4 stars out of 5> Based on 682 reviews!
To that extent, they may have found the right engineering and usability
trade-offs for the home LAN scenario and perhaps even the common soho
solution. I did not see a single comment in the amazon reviews citing
routing issues.
I think we can agree that a single protocol for traversal that works for
all topologies would be ideal.
cheers, peterf
-----Original Message-----
From: Melinda Shore [mailto:mshore(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com]
Sent: Monday, March 18, 2002 2:18 PM
To: Peter Ford
Cc: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: Netmeeting - NAT issue
Ahh, it doesn't have to damage routing transparency. If we were to
use
a signaling protocol that is carefully crafted to preserve routing
transparency (e.g. RSVP) then we can avoid this issue.
That's what I'm working on, but midcom and upnp as they're
currently defined most certainly do have routing-related
problems.
The upnp guys are not really thinking of damaging routing transparency.
Of course they weren't. But the assumptions that the network
is single-homed and that there's only one NAT in the path and
that there are no firewall interactions are inherently non-
general, and any assumption that they fix "the" problem is
necessarily incorrect. Seeing this stuff touted as a general-
purpose fix makes me very uncomfortable.
Melinda