On Tuesday, November 23, 2004, at 08:11 AM, Jeroen Massar wrote:
Did you ever think of the fact that many participants in the IETF
earned
a lot of money selling:
- NAT "solutions"
- VPN "solutions" to overcome the NAT problem
- Consulting in many ways
- Services to 'merge multiple enterprise networks'
- ...
In a lot of cases, I think, the companies you're talking about
didn't seek to enter the NAT work-around market but ended up doing
so in order to get their NAT products to work with their other
products. And, unfortunately, in many, many of those cases the
NAT workarounds are a technical solution to a political problem,
which is that organizationally the products that suffer the most
from the presence of NAT in networks (voice and conferencing,
primarily) are at some distance within their own companies from
the people who make NATs. Rather than seeking to overcome those
organizational problems they go off and make their own workarounds.
Then they bring that technical solution to a political problem to
the IETF and create a more difficult technical problem (for example,
the movement towards work on session border controllers).
The NAT problem is driven by a large (and growing!) number of
factors, ranging from ISP business models to silly corporate
security auditing requirements to user convenience to any number
of other factors. This train can't be stopped; I think our best
hope is to work towards making it better behaved.
Melinda
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