[ale] Looking for advise on domain names and other info wrt local network.

[Forsaken]

On Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:28:23 -0400
"Michael B. Trausch" <mike at trausch.us> wrote:
> I must have missed the short bus somewhere here.

Now was that really called for? Or are you one of those folks who have
to have an arguement rather than a discussion?

> NAT doesn't enhance communication, it _breaks_ it.  The Internet was
> designed for things to be end-to-end.  Protocols that depend on the
> end-to-end functionality of the Internet break without some nasty
> middleware between the client and server (or two peers) working to
> rewrite packets. 

It's a matter of perspective. No matter which way you slice it, NAT
does allow more machines to talk to each other than would otherwise be
able to. I'm well aware of how ugly of a hack it is, I have the
equivalent of a small enterprise network running behind my little
comcast IP, and I've had to deal with all the work arounds to make
services available to the outside world. 

And sure, the internet was designed to be end to end. ipv4 was also
designed to be classful. Do you think that was a good idea too? The
wasteful allocation of the ip4 space before the implementation of CIDR
is mostly responsible for the ip crunch that we're in right now. On the
other hand, I suppose you could say NAT is largely responsible for the
long delay in ipv6 implementation. 

> IPv6 is designed to last for a long time, and it's expected that it
> will have to be replaced, too.  Given that there is 128 bits worth of
> address space in there, though, and that is broken down into network
> names of at most 64 bits, it's expected to last for a while.  It'll
> be around for a very long time if we never leave the planet, since if
> we had that many people and that many machines, we'd probably not
> have the resources to sustain it all---after all, we don't have the
> resources to sustain life indefinitely as it is, with the numbers we
> have now.

*shrug* and 640K ought to be enough for anyone. Not trying to be cute
or sarcastic (well, not much) but the computer industy has found out
time and again that what you think is enough for future growth turns
out to be quite different when the future gets here. 

> And, I'm totally lost on the benefit of NAT when merging two networks
> that are the same non-routable address block.  If I have two networks
> that are 10.0.0.0/8 and I am merging them together, there's going to
> be a lot of collisions, and likely a lot of renumbering.

Well there will certainly be alot of renumbering, but if you stick a
NAT box between them, they can at least talk to each other until things
are consolidated. It's pretty darned useful, since the majority of
folks who allocate RFC1918 space for their corporate networks seem
hellbent on starting at the bottom of the range.

> I've used IPv4 for all of my life, and most of the time that I have
> been using it, NAT has been around.  I'd like to say that I remember
> the days before NAT with absolute clarity, but to be honest, I was a
> dialup user then and fairly new to networking.  But, ever since I ran
> into my first NAT, I was really unhappy with the way Internet access
> worked through it.  I've wanted to see it go away ever since I ran
> into it, really. 

Again, it's a matter of perspective. For folks that just need internet
access, NAT makes things easy. When you need to setup IPSec tunnels, it
makes life hard. 

Please understand that I'm not praising the wonderfulness of NAT and how
it makes life better. I'm a pragmatist. Like any other service, NAT has
it's good points and it has it's problems. I'd love it if Comcast would
give me a /29 (and a full BGP feed, but I'm sick like that) for my
home network. But since this is the company that blocks even *incoming*
port 25, I'm skeptical of whether they would even if we weren't in an
IP crunch. Unfortunately, I don't think widespread ipv6 adoption is
going to happen anytime soon. 

Last I looked, only 4 of the tier 1 providers are offering ip6, and one
of them are only offering tunnels. So like it or not, NAT is a fact of
life in the network world for the forseeable future. If you want an ISP
that's generous with it's bandwidth and not overbearing with it's
policies, you'll have to leave the country to find one.