It seems a pretty simple argument to me. Do I want as many people using (and maybe _buying_, what a concept!) my app as possible with the least amount of network clue and setup headaches, or do I want to eliminate most of the corporate, SOHO, cable, DSL, Linux population because I cant be bothered to develop my app to be NAT-friendly. Duh! All the previous times this discussion has arisen here, I have concluded that "real" IPs should only be owned and used by folks with clue, everyone else gets a NATed IP. Discuss. jm
|> True... neither does a well-firewalled LAN.
There is a substantial difference between broken access and controlled access.
Yes, but there are plenty of apps that will not work if you do not leave open large, arbitrary ranges of udp ports. This is fundamentally incompatible with most sane firewalls. Or NAT.
Why write a protocol that way? Just to prove NAT sucks?
Charles
No, because they were either written before NAT existed and tried hard to conform to the end2end principles of Internet Architecture or they were written after NAT existed and tried hard to conform to the end2end principles of Internet Architecture.
NAT violates the end2end principles of the Internet Architecture by placing one or more policy abstraction layer(s) between the endpoints.
That said, NAT is a tool in the tool box. I'd like to think that its worth the effort to try and recover true end2end.
--bill
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