On Thursday, May 1, 2003, at 03:37 US/Pacific, J. Noel Chiappa wrote:
[...] IPv6 (you reckon) won't succeed in taking off unless it can get
rid of NAT's, but people have NAT's (in part) because they want
identifiers for their machines that are independent of their location
in the connectivity topology. Clearly, you can't have a single label
which is both location-independent (so it's provider independent) and
location-dependent (so that the routing works). Which is why people
use NAT's to do this... but you claim IPv6 will fail to take off if it
can't get rid of NAT's. [...]
I work for a company that sells a NAT device. Among other things, I
maintain the ALG's in that NAT. My code is bundled into their
802.11b/g access point. They also have a software version of this
product bundled into the operating system they own for the computers
they make.
I can assure you that the vast majority of those customers using the
NAT in either of these products-- and I get a lot of customer feedback
in the form of bugs and enhancement requests-- are doing so for reasons
that are far less technical than you suggest.
They are *not* doing it because they "want identifiers for their
machines that are independent of their location in the connectivity
topology." They are doing it because they want to share their Internet
access with multiple computers. The extent to which they are unhappy
with the NAT function in those products is exactly the extent to which
NAT fails to be totally transparent-- which it can never be, because of
the Internet architecture.
If the only customers using NAT were the ones that really really really
wanted "identifiers for their machines that are independent of their
location in the connectivity topology," then I would feel completely
safe writing applications that fail in the presence of NAT. They would
not be deployed in anywhere near the numbers they are clearly deployed
now. (In fact, I'd probably be extra tickled by the fact that my
application failed on the remaining networks. Their managers would be
getting what they deserve, in my jaundiced view.)
Have any of you looked at the actual marketing copy that sells real
people on why they might want to pay real money for a NAT box? It
might be instructive.
--
j h woodyatt <jhw(_at_)wetware(_dot_)com>