Fri, 24 Oct 2003

NAT

I gotta think about this ... as a developer, NAT has caused me no end of grief. And as a user, workarounds to get certain P2P services running behind NAT can be a royal pain. But ...

NAT also provides some measure of protection as a sort of "firewall" (and I know I'm using the term loosely here). NAT provides, via the options usually attached to a NAT router, for example, the ability to run a completely promiscious mail server inside a LAN - which can be most useful in the case of mixed networks (such as my home LAN).

NAT is also cheaper - I don't care how many IPv6 numbers are available, it's still finate, and they will still cost cash - if not immediately, at some point in the future where everybody's refrigerator is online all the time.

So, like I said, it's something to think about - I just can't see it being as cut and dried an issue as the headline might suggest.

NAT: Just Say No. Fueled by the lack of public IP addresses, 70% of Fortune 1000 companies have been forced to deploy NATs (Source: Center for Next Generation Internet). NATs are also found in hundreds of thousands of small business and home networks where several hosts must share a single IP address. It has been so successful in slowing the depletion of IPv4 addresses that many have questioned the need for IPv6 in the near future. However, such conclusions ignore the fact that a strategy based on avoiding... [CircleID]

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