Re: RES: ReN: IPv6 tranisition issues

----- Original Message -----
From: "Fred L. Templin" <[email protected]>
To: "Keith Moore" <[email protected]>
Cc: "Marcelo Barbosa Lima" <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>;
<[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, January 06, 2003 2:03 PM
Subject: Re: RES: ReN: (ngtrans) IPv6 tranisition issues


> Keith,
>
> No offense intended, but I am beginning to suspect that you have
> somehow implemented an "automatic insult generator" in your mailer
> that is triggered anytime someone mentions the word "NAT". :^}
>
> Fred Templin
> [email protected]
>
> Keith Moore wrote:
> > On Mon, 6 Jan 2003 08:56:20 -0200
> > "Marcelo Barbosa Lima" <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>  I think that NAT is a good workaround and it can be done to support
all aplications
> >
> >
> > you are mistaken.  your statement is completely and utterly incorrect.
> >
> > Keith
>
>
>

Keith Moore SHOULD have written:

NAT breaks Unix applications but not Windows applications.

My opinion: the original purpose of TCP port numbers and UDP port numbers
was to allow more than one process or user to share the same connection or
other resource. For instance, when two or more people access a web site each
one gets a one or more port numbers to go with the site's address. This way,
the web site only needs to have ONE address.

LIkewise, NAT essentially does the same thing on the other end by allowing a
LAN or other subnet to pretend to be a single timesharing machine with only
ONE IPv4 address. This is much like how if I open a 2nd instance of Internet
Explorer on my browser (which currently does not have NAT software) it uses
port 81 instead of port 80. That is, the 2nd instance figures that somebody
else grabbed port 80 first so it just goes and finds another open port. NAT
is just simply an extension of existing concepts that were first applied to
mainframes that were connected to Arpanet.

I have played around with enough firewalls and NAT packages to know that
software quality varies all over the place. As for the claim that NAT breaks
applications there is sometimes a problem with pushing the right buttons to
get it to work. Norton Antivirus 2002 for instance will crash some web pages
because I have script blocking enabled - it is not really possible to tell
if a script is friendly or malicious. Likewise, Popup Stopper has an
override feature to allow friendly popups.

Mike Cole, [email protected]