Lloyd Wood wrote: > > On Mon, 26 Nov 2001, Caitlin Bestler wrote: ... > > My point remains, a globally meaningful address is something that > > should only be applied when it is useful for that endpoint to > > be globally addressable. > > I think we're lucky that this point was not applied to the design of > IP twenty-odd years ago. We'd then have a bunch of restricted gateways > that translate email - badly - no universal telnet, no universal ftp, > and certainly no web...
Actually, it *was* applied earlier (by default), and it was as a result of the ensuing disconnects and general uselessness that the Internet (a.k.a. Catenet) concept was developed by Pouzin, Cerf and Kahn. NAT has simply pushed us back to the pre-1978 situation. The references are in RFC 2775, section 2.3. Brian
