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Re: My thoughts on local-use addresses

2003-05-01 13:18:34
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>