Re: [midcom] WG scope/deliverables

[Keith Moore <moore at cs.utk.edu>]

> Keith, why don't you start an NAT-Haters mailing list, and take all this
> disgust with NAT's there? (I'm quite serious about this.)

Noel, 

I expressed an opinion that this group should confine itself to addressing
short-term goals rather than trying to make NATs a part of the Internet
architecture.  

I said this because I've looked at the problem quite extensively.
The more I have done so, the more have concluded that there's no way 
to restore the valuable functionality that NATs have removed from the 
Internet without providing another global address space, and that it's 
much more efficient and less painful to embellish the NATs to become 
IPv6 routers than it is to embellish both the NATs and applications to 
support a segmented address space.  

Thus, while I accept that the market needs a short-term solution to deal 
with NATs, I also am firmly of the opinion that it's a short-term solution.  
IPv6 will be attractive for the same reasons that NAT was attractive - 
it will be the path of least pain to solving a pressing set of problems.

Being over-ambitious about goals has prevented more than one working 
group from accomplishing anything useful, and exhausted lots of 
talented people in the process.  I hardly think that advocating a little 
restraint in this group's ambition is sufficient justification for 
personal attacks.

Keith