----- Original Message ----- From: "Dr. Subrata Goswami" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Also, as you know AH is completely broken by NAT. Why has > NAT become popular ? I can only guess: a quick and dirty fix > for IPv4 address scarcity; some firewall benefits. >
NAT has become popular, partly because of the absurd, subjective, IPv4 allocation policies, enacted by the academics and government employees (who usually pay nothing for allocations), and backed by the large corporations who have their own massive allocations separate from the rest of the peasants. NAT has also become popular because of a natural tendancy for humans to simplify via aggregation and encapsulation. Look at everyday life, much of what goes on is people putting things into other things and labeling the result. You might try working the other direction to see why NAT makes sense. Take a typical PC. Look at the physical components, CPU, Keyboard, Mouse, Monitor, Printer. Imagine that all of those components were on a high-speed LAN as their interconnect. Imagine that each of the components had a unique IP address. Would people find it useful to ping the mouse of someone on the other side of planet Earth ? No, they box it all up and call it a PC, and give it one IP address, they then box their PC up with a NAT appliance and call that a vPC (Virtual PC). They then move in the other direction with a focus on the "services" that their vPC can provide and access. It is a natural evolution. The control freaks of course do not like people having knowledge and the ability to do their own packaging and administration. They have built their careers making resources scarce and telling people what is "right". Jim Fleming 2002:[IPv4]:000X:03DB http://www.IPv8.info -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
