Re: Number of Firewall/NAT Users

[Ed Gerck <egerck at nma.com>]

Keith Moore wrote:

> > | 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.
>
> Actually it was sort of useful, if you knew how to translate.
> (or could find a local mail expert that did)
>
> But you missed the point I was trying to make. in those days, the inability
> of the mail network (or at least parts of it) to support a single global
> address space was correctly recognized as a deficiency in the network -
> and people took action to solve the problem (notably deployng MX records).

Which broke DNS.  We can no longer send an email to an IP number, mainly
due to this myopic choice.  This choice also broke layer independency.

So, even though there is no reason why one needs to use DNS in order to send
an email, people must use it nowadays for this purpose.  What was a convenience
became a limitation because of a bad design choice in MX records.  So much for
a "single global address space" that does not respect local flexibility.

NAT boxes are thus just IMO a healthy rebound of the very principles that created
the Internet -- and we must be careful, otherwise pretty soon we are going to have
other things to "solve the problem" (notably as it happened with MX records).

It is time IMO for some at the IETF to stop pretending that the Internet can made into a
homogeneous network.  It wasn't and it won't.  Cooperation is not a bunch of people
doing the same things at the same time, but different people doing different things
at different times and places, for the same objective. Likewise, standardization is not
having the same rules for all at all places but having different rules that interoperate
for the same objective.

Interoperation should be the defining factor for an Internet standard, and the same
applies to NAT boxes.  If they interoperate, what else should be required?  Nothing.

Cheers,

Ed Gerck