Chris Wedgwood
Fair enough... it's a technically evil hack that does happen to work most of the time. But its still a hack, and it makes IP work is ways it was never designed for, so sometimes bad stuff happens.
Mostly it breaks in places where protocol layering is violated (e.g. putting a network address in the application layer), in which case it's going to break when you go to IPv6 (or any other protocol) anyway. It also doesn't work very well for peer-to-peer comms. But peer-to-peer comms are a problem when setting up any kind of firewall anyway. NAT/PNAT, along with other types of firewalls, recognises that between IP and TCP or UDP headers, there's 48 bits of address space, much of which is going to waste. It also recognises that "The Internet" doesn't need to include every single internal host, and that there should be a definite boundary between internal, non-public networks and the public Internet. Stop treating IP addresses as host addresses and the IP address space problem largely goes away. -- don --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog