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RE: NAT support and laws for the lawless



> Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
> > People appear to be so caught up in whether we should be 
> supporting NAT that
> > the issue of how to support NAT is forgotten about.
> 
> Agreed. However, at some point we're writing laws for the 
> lawless. NATs 
> exist only by breaking what few real standards we've had in the 
> Internet. Writing standards for the rest of us to traverse a moving, 
> lawless target is not necessarily productive, IMO.

Most of the NAT vendors are engaged in IETF and have shown wilingness to
comply with IETF standards, provided they allow them to get their job done.

NAT has an important security role. We deploy it because our customers want
to conceal their IP addresses against traffic analysis.

Given that in the original Internet design IP was just the protocol run on
the 'network of networks' I don't think that the claims that NAT is foreign
to the Internet is valid. NAT appears to me to be part and parcel of the
original concept.


> email is a specious analogy, because many of the legacy systems were 
> implemented before, not in defiance of, Internet specs.

Many of the problems with email are caused by compliance with IETF specs
that were based on a broken model. The idea that servers should perform
character set translation was broken, as was the idea that servers should do
line wrapping for the client. But those servers are out there.

When we designed HTTP all sorts of people were telling us that the protocol
should assume that proxies mangle headers in the same way that mail agents
do. Some well known IETF folks were screaming and stamping their feet,
claiming that we should transport all images using BASE64 encoding, in case
someone was using a connection that was not 8 bit clean.

But as I said, it does not matter how we got into the swamp or whose fault
it is. We are now in the swampt and we cannot get out of it using the
mathematicians technique 'assume that we are on dry land'.

		Phill

Phillip Hallam-Baker (E-mail).vcf