NAT's raison d'etre is that IP is broken, NAT doesn't completely solve this problem, and creates a whole new set of problems that will plague the world until a new version of IP can be deployed (which interestingly enough, is made much more complicated by the prevalence of NAT itself).
In the meantime Plan 9 and /net make it much easier to work around IP's limitations because network stacks can be shared easily across systems, and much more importantly by being completely network protocol agnostic, part of the beauty of importing /net is that you might not even be using IP to reach your gateway, and that applications don't care what network protocols either your local host or the gateway speak. The IP world has been trying to move to IPv6 for almost a decade, and it will be at least that long before the migration is done, plus it will be a painful and cumbersome process with lots of wasted resources along the way. In the Plan 9 world, migrating to a new network protocol is pretty much a non-issue, which as I think somebody pointed out, is not hard to accomplish over a weekend. Peace uriel P.S.: I have zero interest in discussing NAT or IPv6, if you are interested go watch the talks at Google's IPv6 conference, and you will see how much misery NAT is causing. On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 12:45 PM, Eris Discordia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If there were no real routers and the world still used bang paths you > wouldn't be thinking about overlay networks the way you do. Does your > thinking fall under the same category of fallacy? > > By the way, I think you have missed the meaning of raison d'etre. There is a > necessity, a problem, somebody responds, solves the problem. NAT (or TCP/IP, > or Plan 9) emerges. > > --On Saturday, November 15, 2008 11:57 PM -0700 andrey mirtchovski > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>> 5. If you need NAT weigh the options of doing it. It may turn out that >>> importing /net is the best choice for your application. Or it may turn >>> out otherwise. /net has a raison d'etre--regular NAT, too. >> >> If regular NAT hadn't been invented you wouldn't be thinking in terms >> of regular NAT, therefore you wouldn't be "needing NAT". >> >> Post hoc ergo propter hoc. (you'll find it under "logical fallacy" on >> wikipedia) >> > > > > > >
