begin  quoting Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade as of Fri, Mar 24, 2006 at 10:39:51PM -0800:
> On Mar 24, 2006, at 6:58 PM, Stewart Stremler wrote:
> >begin  quoting Tracy R Reed as of Fri, Mar 24, 2006 at 04:18:45PM  
> >-0800:
> >>I am so tired of NAT.
> >
> >You like default-allow security policies then?
> 
> Red herring.

Not really.

The big complain people tend to throw around with NAT is "it breaks
the inherent end-to-end connectivity of the Internet", which is exactly
what a default-deny setup on a firewall will do.

We've been down this road before.  And, frankly, I don't give a damn
if the new gee-whiz P2P application of the month wants to open up
random server sockets so that all of its bretheren can talk to it. I
get to set network policy on my own little piece of the network, just
because it's _my_ network, no $random_developer's.

If I can't tell an application what port it should run on, that
application is _broke_.  (Likewise, if an application tunnels everything
over port 80, it's broken as well, as that removes the fine-grained
control I desire on my network, and I'm now forced to get a much
smarter proxy firewall. Bad developer! No biscuit!)

(Remember, the Internet was also all about clear-text passwords, trusting
source packets based on their reported IP address, trusting ports less than
1023, etc. etc.  Not _all_ early ideas are good ones.)

On a tangent...

NPR recently had a show where they discussed the future.  They brought
out the idea of a roll of postage-sized cameras at $0.01 each. Give a
kid a roll of these things, color 'em like stickers, and he'll go home
and slap 'em up everywhere around the house.  Each one can have an IP
address and a web-server...  and I was left thinking "Why is IPv6 a good
idea again?"

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