Subject: Re: IP network address assignments/allocations information?

From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>
Date: 02 Dec 1999 17:54:09 -0500

Ian King <[email-masked]> writes:
> And yes, additional IP addresses were going to cost dramatically more.  NAT
> was a simple case of economics... but on the other hand, I don't experience
> any "lack" because of it.

You aren't a large corporation trying to deal with huge numbers of
private customer connections running over IP. When you've been
awakened in the middle of the night every night for a week, because
the NAT rules to deal with the fact that you have several
intercommunicating networks all of which think they're 10.0.0.0/8 have
become so complex no human can really remember them all any more,
you'd experience what many of the rest of us feel week after week. The
lack in question is a lack of sleep.

Anyone out there who thinks NAT works well and is harmless is not
familiar with how the brave new world of pseudo-internetworking
works.

"Oh, no. When we moved the mail hub for the client access networks in
location A, it seems no one remembered to update the NAT rules for the
systems in location C. That's why the help desk has been inundated
for three days..."

Perry

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From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>
Date: 02 Dec 1999 17:54:09 -0500

Perry

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From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 05 Dec 1999 16:20:20 +0100

At 09:31 30.11.99 -0500, John Day wrote:

>I would tend to agree.  As I have said elsewhere, NATs in and of themselves
>do nothing wrong.  They are doing things within the Internet/Network Layer
>that are perfectly legal.  (In essence, they are treating the network
>address in much the same way that X.25, ATM, and MPLS treat their
>addresses.)

No. They are treating the network address (+port) in the same way that X.25 
and ATM treat their VC/VP identifiers.

In the X.25/ATM case, that's the way those networks were designed; what is 
called addresses in those designs are *not* mashed around by the switches 
(apart from the cruelties that prefix add/remove does to X.25 addresses 
that transit service provider boundaries).

This is not how IP was designed.

I would have a hard time proving from Descartes' first principles that this 
is "wrong". I have no hesitation at all in saying that I find it extremely 
distasteful.

                  Harald A

--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, EDB Maxware, Norway
[email-masked]

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From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 05 Dec 1999 16:20:20 +0100

Harald A

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From: John Day <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Dec 1999 15:11:49 -0500

>is "wrong". I have no hesitation at all in saying that I find it extremely
That was the whole point.   ;-)

Take care,
John

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From: John Day <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Dec 1999 15:11:49 -0500

Take care,
John