Where NAT disenfranchises the end-user ...

Fri Sep 7 04:49:00 UTC 2001

> "Charles Sprickman" <spork at inch.com>

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

NATs are a band-aid.

> 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.

FTP was designed for ARPANET, H.323 was designed to work over ANY packet
network. Neither of them were designed for TCP/IP in particular.

They don't break the end-to-end design principles though. Neither do network
games, chat tools, and other peer-to-peer protocols that run in elected-server
or server-to-server modes.

The fact is that I can write an Internet-compliant application in about two
minutes that will break every NAT ever sold, simply because they don't have a
proxy for the protocol. NATs violate fundamental Internet principles. They
were broken from the start.