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Re: Netmeeting - NAT issue

2002-03-20 12:30:02
That sounds like running away from the problem .....
U have enough IP addresses so not to worry about it ...
Deployment of that is going to take some time .... and how many ISP's
provide that ...???
IPV6 is running away from current problem .... not the solution ......
Vivek

----- Original Message -----
From: "Keith Moore" <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu>
To: "J. Noel Chiappa" <jnc(_at_)ginger(_dot_)lcs(_dot_)mit(_dot_)edu>
Cc: <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2002 10:17 PM
Subject: Re: Netmeeting - NAT issue


Oh, piffle. NAT's don't "harm the Internet", any more than a host of
other
things:

the fact that other things do harm doesn't mean that NATs don't also
do harm, or that the harm done by NAT is somehow lessened or excused.
and IMHO most of the other things you mentioned do less harm than NATs,
though I agree there are a lot of folks out there who are getting away
with screwing the net.

All of which leads me to a simple conclusion: one big reason that you
and any
number of other people are upset about NAT's has nothing to do with
their
technical shortcomings. Rather, what gets people so aggravated is that
they
are killing off the "preferred" alternative.

The reason I'm upset about NATs is that they make it difficult to
build distributed and peer-to-peer apps, and they encourage a model
where the net is centrally controlled (not by a single center, but
by a relatively small number of providers who control the center).

I didn't get seriously interested in IPv6 until I realized that they
were the most likely viable solution to the NAT problem.   In hindsight
I would have done IPv6 somewhat differently.  But it's possible to start
IPv6, make applications work with it, and maybe fix a few things about
v6 along with way as people learn more about its shortcomings.  NATs,
on the other hand, are completely intractable.  e.g. even if you can
come up with a better solution to the firewall access problem (and
I think that's possible, though we're nowhere close to that now), as
long as you have NATs you're still stuck with the problems inherent
in a partitioned address space.

Keith



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