I seem to be able to connect to port-forwarded services behind my office NAT firewall just fine from my laptop behind my home NAT box. Whats the problem? jm At 11:25 AM -0700 9/7/01, Joel Jaeggli wrote:
On Fri, 7 Sep 2001, Mike Batchelor wrote:
NAT rewrites certain packet data fields (src addr, src port, sometimes mac addr). So does a ordinary router (ttl decrement). One breaks end2end, the other does not. What is the difference?
I think you will find that a definition of "end2end" is a lot more squishy than you want it to be.
Actually I think It's very simple... in a world were potentially any device can be a tcp based server the fredom to connect to it regardless of what network it's behind is critical... if all my devices are on different networks, behind different nats connecting between them becomes very hard... if we have for example, my cell phone behind a nat at my cell provider, my home computer, behind my home nat because my provider will only give me one ip, and my home nat behind my provider nat, because my provider doesn't have enough v4 address space, how do I initiate a connection between my cell phone and my home-computer, or vice-versa, if we add a third device, my laptop sitting behind a broadband wireless providers nat how do I interconnect them, that fact that they're all ip enabled has in fact bought me squat.
end-to-end is the freedom to initiate a connection between any two tcp enabled devices. something which some of us take for granted in the ip world, but which is being rapidly eroded.
joelja
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