Re: An idea: GxSE

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>]

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Daniel Senie wrote:

> >There are quite a few things we can do to improve NAT:

> >- 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.

A pointer or the full name would be helpful.

> 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.

I'm very tempted to say that people with such a setup are asking for whatever
problems they are getting... But I'm not.

If NAT is ever to become a serious alternative to real connectivity, there is
a lot to be done. If a control protocol makes things better for a lot of
people, I think it's a good thing. Too bad for those who use setups that are
even more complex. They should just keep doing things the way they are now.

> 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.

Obviously that would be just about the first requirement for any serious
multihoming alternative. I don't think it's worth the effort to think about
outgoing-only multihoming.

Iljitsch