While it is important to focus on building protocols that are as functional as possible in as many different environments as possible, I find the statement that protocols are "functionally deficient" that do not take NAT and firewalls into account to be misguided. The ultimate goal of a network, in my mind, is to create an invisible connection between process running in distributed systems regardless of their location or connectivity. While protocol development is an appropriate place to address issues introduced by lower-level elements of the overall system, development of the lower levels should be focused on making development at higher levels as straight-forward as is practical.
As has been discussed more exhaustively and ably by others than I am able to, NAT breaks this model. By introducing a single point-of-failure into the overall system and by also introducing artificial limitations linked directly to the temporary scarcity of address space, it is an anomoly in the overall development of the network system.
The overall design philosophy for the network system, at least in my way of thinking, is one of inclusion and direct communication. We should endeavor to develop with that mindset.
ssh
| Paul Ferguson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
11/30/99 05:10 AM
|
To: "Tony Hain (Exchange)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: IP network address assignments/allocations information? |
Hi Tony,
Well, the statement below is not true -- I sit behind a NAT/PAT
device and Real PLayer works just fine for me. I've only found a
couple of applications that will not work for me (e.g. ICQ, NTP,
SNMP), but then again, I'm not a gamer so I can't speak to the
broader range of applications that it _does_ break.
In any event, I've always personally been of the opinion that
if applications don't work in the face of NAT, then the
applications themselves are functionally deficient and should be
fixed. :-)
Cheers,
- paul
At 10:44 AM 11/29/1999 -0800, Tony Hain (Exchange) wrote:
>1) Yes ... We have been forced into a world of NAT where simple
>applications such as Real Player won't work without real-time manual
>intervention at the NAT.
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