the evidence I have is from reading vendor advertisements for NAT
boxes, and from talking to people who run networks that use NAT.
it's not a random sample, perhaps not a statistically significant
one, but it's been enough to convince me personally that the
delusion is widespread.
You can perhaps understand why I wouldn't consider this a particularly
convincing line of argument.
of course. but you can perhaps understand why I don't consider your
intiution to the contrary convincing either?
What applications that people want to run--and the IT managers would
want to enable--are actually inhibited by NAT?
depends on the people. the people I work with want to run large-scale
distributed computing problems. other people want to use SIP to support
internet telephony or for some other purpose. others want to use
IPsec... yes there are workarounds for many of these, but they have to
be invented on a case-by-case basis, and often they're expensive.