quietly....

Fri Feb 4 21:57:12 UTC 2011

In article <F05D77A9631CAE4097F7B69095F1B06F039104 at EX02.drtel.lan>, 
Brian Johnson <bjohnson at drtel.com> writes

>Some people have no perspective on what the Internet is and it's real 
>power. I've met too many people who claim to be "in the know" on these 
>topics that don't understand that NAT was designed for address 
>preservation.

Especially as most (I guess) users of NATing CPEs only have one dynamic 
IP address, of which they are generally oblivious.

I have a feeling that the first NAT box I had (maybe 12 years ago), 
connected to the Internet by dial-up, where traditionally the user 
inherits the IP address (singular) of the modem/gateway they dialled 
into, even if they have multiple hosts on their premises.

>That was the only/primary/driving real reason for its development. The 
>other "features" were side effects and are not intended to be solutions 
>to production issues.

But NAT does have the useful (I think) side effect that I don't have to 
renumber my network when I change upstream providers - whether that's 
once every five years like I just did with my ADSL, or once every time 
the new ADSL hiccups[1] now that I have a CPE with 3G failover.

[1] Seems to be about weekly, so far.
-- 
Roland Perry