Re: arguments against NAT?

[Masataka Ohta <[e-mail]>]

Spencer Dawkins;

> And, to follow up on my own posting (sigh), RFC 3235 and 3027 are
> Informational... we have no STD, and no BCP, that come up when you
> search for NAT or Network Address Translator, so... perhaps there is
> no community consensus document that says what the community consensus
> appears to be, and the best thing to do is to Google "NAT end-to-end"
> and leave the result as an exercise for the reader?

There was a discussion on IETF ML in April and May of 2000 on

	draft-ietf-nat-protocol-complications-02.txt

and, vint, for example, wrote:

	Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2000 06:20:48 -0400
	From: "vinton g. cerf" <[e-mail]>
	Subject: Re: draft-ietf-nat-protocol-complications-02.txt

	that's right - they use iMODE on the DOCOMO mobiles. iMODE and
	WAP seem to have that in common: a non-IP radio link protocol
	and an application gateway. Of course, this limits the applications
	to those that can be "translated" in the gateway, while an end to
	end system (such as the Ricochet from Metricom) would allow 
	essentially any application on an Internet server to interact
	directly with the mobile device because the gateway would merely
	be an IP level device, possibly with NAT functionality.

So, according to vint, NAT is less evil than gateway translation.

Of course, the technical reality not tainted by commercialism is
that NAT translate protocols at the IP, transport and application
layers.

But, you can't expect much help against NAT from IETF.

							Masataka Ohta