Re: An idea: GxSE

[Daniel Senie <dts@senie.com>]

At 11:01 AM 6/25/01, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

>There are quite a few things we can do to improve NAT:
>
>- make it stateless so there is no longer a single point of failure and
>   scalability is improved

This is not necessarily a stumbling block for NAT. There are many NAT 
implementations out there which handle redundancy through the use of 
duplicate, cooperative hardware, just as well as the web load balancers 
which can't be a single point of failure. There are also some which handle 
multi-homing without the use of BGP by using address blocks from separate 
links and managing load and failover.

>- add a "NAT control protocol" so applications can instruct the NAT box to
>   enable/disable certain features and find out what their "real" address is

Please go read the RSIP documents. There are a LOT of problems with this, 
not the least of which is there may be multiple layers of NAT between a 
workstation and the global address space. It is quite problematic to deal 
with these cases, and they ARE common.


>There is one thing that NAT has going for it that will kind of break in GxSE:
>the hosts don't need to do or know anything special. But both the host and
>the router have to support GxSE. Obviously, when every host runs GxSE this is
>no longer a problem, but this is not something that is going to happen any
>time soon.

And since NAT doesn't provide a reliable end-point address in some cases, 
there's no way to put servers behind it. Or peer-to-peer neworking 
applications.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Daniel Senie                                        dts@senie.com
Amaranth Networks Inc.                    http://www.amaranth.com