On Sun, 9 Sep 2001, Adam McKenna wrote:
On Sun, Sep 09, 2001 at 11:30:26AM -0700, woody weaver wrote:
I'm not sure who was first, in terms of IOS NAT and ip_masq. If memory serves (and it usually doesn't) then 11.2 was released around Aug 97. I don't see any easy way to identify the release date.
Unfortunately, I let my urge to smack Meyer down mask the original intent of my message.
To tell you the truth, I don't really care what products were shipping NAT first -- the fact still remains that NAT was not some hack created by a small group of people so that the "poor dialup user" could take revenge against the evil ISP that won't give out more than 1 IP for $20/month (as Meyer would have you believe). It is a documented standard, brought about by the IETF as a means of conserving IPv4 space.
Right, the tradition has roots at least a few years further back in the hack created by the "poor dialup shell account user" to allow them to get SLIP (and, at some point, CSLIP and PPP) access to the net without needing their own IP assigned by using a shell server they had an account on, with it's IP address. First done in TIA, then SLiRP. That was... 1994 or earlier. And TIA is essentially NAT, implemented in a manner that would be considered peculiar compared to today's common implementations. Hmm... guess even then it was at least partly used to conserve IP addresses, especially when handing out static IPs to every dialup user was more common. I know of a few universities that used to hand out SLIP accounts with static IPs quite freely, but then switched to recommending people use TIA where they could. That became irrelevant later, of course, when support for dynamically allocated SLIP addresses became widespread, along with PPP. So in this case it was both "preserve IPs" and "take revenge against the evil (provider of some sort)". However, note that things "created by the IETF" are normally created by a small group of people with their own agendas. And that there can be a big difference between the reasons a so-called "standard" was introduced and the reasons why people deployed it. But it seems quite true that the demand from dialup/DSL/etc. usres for NAT only really ramped up after deployment in more corporate settings ramped up. (sorry, I couldn't resist. Anyone looking for _real_ content on nanog is already ignoring this thread, so why not... thankfully, 95% of the irrelevant content on nanog is in long, easily ignored threads.)