Re: Number of Firewall/NAT Users

[smd at ebone.net (Sean Doran)]

Keith Moore writes:

| at least in those days, gateway proponents didn't insist that people
| shouldn't include email addresses in the bodies of their messages.

You miss the point that including "GRECO::MARYK" as an email address
in a USENET message is about as useful as including 10.0.0.26 in an
IP header -- the local meaning is essentially unusable to a non-local 
recipient.

Nobody really constrains protocols from carrying a local IP address
around any more than anyone constrains from putting local addresses
into a text message.   It's just that communicating by naively replying
to such an embedded address is unlikely to work.

RFC-822 was a great leap forward for embedding a global namespace into
text messages, and I am pleased to say that even my own RFC-822 address
works fine at UKY, despite my NAT stance. :-)

There needs to be an RFC-822 for identifying IP-packet-receivers independtly
from actual network topology analogous to the way that identified mailboxes
independtly from actual network topology (hey, consider that you even
may have had your mail cross different types of small-i internet when
sending mail to places like foo at mitvma.mit.edu!).

	Sean.