Re: why market picked up NATs [Re: Writeups on why RFC1918 is bad?]

> Keith Moore writes:
>  > > From my SF-centric Nexus-of-the-web-trendiod
>  > > standpoint: for residential use (especially with
>  > > broadband) it is simply impossible to have an
>  > > argument about the evils of NAT. 
>  > 
>  > that's the stupidest thing that's been said here in a long time.
>  > 
>  > NATs are at least as harmful in a residential environment as in any
>  > other environment.  It's just that residential customers are slower
>  > to realize the problems with NAT and they have less ability to get
>  > blocks of addresses routed to them at reasonable prices than other
>  > customers.
> 
> I have no idea what it is that you think you're
> arguing with because it is simply my observation
> having tried to get people to understand why their
> innocent cuddly NAT boxen are really wolves in
> sheep's clothing. How you derive "stupid" from
> that is beyond me as it's a complete non-sequitur
> unless a mere observation can now be assessed for
> its intelligence quotient.

Sorry, I must have taken that statement in a different way than was
intended.  

I have also seen that it's difficult to convince people that their NATs
cause problems. The people I've talked to fall into two categories:

1. Those who are technically savvy enough to be aware of the
limitations of NAT.  These people are usually also savvy enough to work
around those limitations for small-scale use, but they might have to 
deal with some annoying restriction or another - e.g. having to run
certain apps on one particular machine.   They don't see NAT as the
problem - they see NAT as an imperfect workaround for the inability
to get multiple addresses routed to their home net at a reasonable
price.  (some of these people think that NAT has a security benefit,
so a bit of education would still help.)

2. Those who aren't technically savvy enough to be aware of NAT's
limitations.  To those people, NAT is how you hook up multiple computers
to the net - they are probably not even aware that there is such a thing
as address translation going on.  And if any apps don't work in that
environment, it must be the app vendor's fault - after all, everyone
else's network works just like theirs, right?

Most of the people in group 1 can be convinced, with some effort, that
the workarounds they use for NAT's limitations don't scale well to
ordinary users, and that the widespread deployment of NAT limits the
ability to deploy certain kinds of applications.  The people in group 2
(i.e. the vast majority) are hopeless, because they don't realize that
the Internet has the potential to provide any more services than email,
the web, and IM.  (anything that AOL doesn't provide doesn't exist)

So I'd say that it certainly is possible to have an informed argument
about the evils of NAT for residential use, what is difficult is to
have a useful discussion about NAT with the typical residential user.

Keith

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