On Sunday 26 December 2010 22:11:17 you wrote: > On 12/26/2010 02:40 PM, Marko Vojinovic wrote: > > The only permanent solution to usability of p2p in general is IPv6, where > > all addresses will be public and thus accessible from outside. And IPv6 > > would fix other protocols broken by introduction of NAT, not just p2p > > stuff. > > Why would anyone want all internal machines public anyway ? > > Historically, we used nat for 2 purposes: > > (1) to shield inside machines > (2) free up ipv4 (was an accidental consequence of (1) There was a quite large thread on the CentOS list recently about this. In a nutshell, the conclusion is that (1) is an urban legend --- NAT *does* *not* (and moreover, *should* *not* ) shield your inside machines from outside attacks. You still need to use the proper firewall for shielding. The only benefit of NAT is (2), ie. artificially enlarging the scope of available v4 IP numbers, at the price of breaking functionality. And this is not a consequence of (1), but rather the primary reason why NAT was introduced in the first place. After IPv6 gets introduced, the number of available IP addresses will be more than enough to eliminate any need for NAT, while for security you'll still use the same firewall as you needed to do with IPv4. The net gain is that protocols that were broken by NAT will not be broken anymore, in addition to the larger address space. Of course, some people will remain dense forever and keep implementing NAT even in IPv6, with an illusion that it will improve their security. Those people cannot be helped, unfortunately... ;-) Best, :-) Marko -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
