Where NAT disenfranchises the end-user ...

Fri Sep 7 04:16:06 UTC 2001

On Thu, 6 Sep 2001, Roeland Meyer wrote:

> Hello all,
>
>
> To be honest, even though I've used NAT myself and have implemented NAT for
> friends and clients, I would NEVER represent that a NAT'd address has the
> full connectivity to the Internet that a static address does.

True...  neither does a well-firewalled LAN.

NAT has it's place, and we have many happy customers that are quite
pleased with their NAT'd connections; some simple, some fancy.

What irks me more than NAT are crappy protocols like FTP and H.323 that
make too many assumptions about how much of my machine I am willing to
expose in order to communicate using these protocols.  I particularly
detest any software that is not content to let the far end figure out
the source address of a packet.

NAT and firewalls have a way of showing you how poorly designed these
protocols are.

Charles