On Fri, Sep 07, 2001 at 11:57:24AM -0700, Mike Batchelor wrote:
Well of course, that was my point. Where do you draw the line? The packet as received is not identical to the packet as it was sent, even when NAT is not involved. Along the way, various things get modified, the packet is encapulated, unwrapped, re-encapsulated, TTLs get decremented, ... all things that are necessary and part of the process of getting the packet to its destination. NAT just has more necessary things to change. I'm not defending NAT, I dislike it as much as the next clueholder, I am just taking the devil's advocate position for the sake of discussion.
Encapsulation does not modify the encapsulated packet. It just sends a new packet that happens to have a data portion which can be interpreted by the remote end as being a packet which it should forward from there. TTL decrement A) was intended to be rewritten on a per-packet basis, by design, and B) is not identity information in any fashion. Please name one part of a "normal TCP connection" (IE, without anything in between but, say, some copper wire and ethernet NICs carrying IP directly, and a router or two doing straight per-hop forwarding) which both gets rewritten, and has *any* form of identity, or for that matter, wasn't explicitly intended to be rewritten per-hop by the origional spec. -- *************************************************************************** Joel Baker System Administrator - lightbearer.com lucifer@lightbearer.com http://www.lightbearer.com/~lucifer