Eric Rescorla writes: > P.S. And btw, I'm not advocating NAT. What I'm advocating is that > we stop behaving as if we think that anyone who uses NAT is obviously > an idiot. I don't think that I've seen anybody say that. Most people who use NAT have no clue one way or the other about NAT any more than they possess clue about, oh say, 8086 instruction sets on modern day processors. They aren't "idiots" because they aren't claiming any (deep) knowledge about the subject. They're merely ignorant and just trying to get by with limited knowledge. However, it's quite a leap to go from general ignorance about the inner workings of computers and networks to divining user's True Intents based on their purchasing habits. I doubt that many people go out with the intent of getting cancer when they buy a pack of ciggies, but that is often the end result. And people today have far more clue about smoking than they do about NAT's. People use NAT's for all kinds of perfectly good reasons (I agree with Noel's analysis too, btw), but it doesn't mean that cancer isn't an end result there too. Voice is a great example of the malignant chickens coming home to roost. So I just don't see what the value is in introducing the Voice of the Masses as indicative of anything one way or the other about NAT. They have requirements, and NAT's provide solutions for some of those requirements, in much the same way that smoking provides teenagers with a solution to the requirement to be cool. Our job, however, is to look at the *all* of the requirements and see if they are best served with a given set of technology. That's because we're paid to understand this stuff and look out for the long term health of the net. Which isn't to say that we're infallible or incapable of indulging in religious fervor, but we're at least semi informed unlike the great unwashed masses. Thus, I think it's *far* more productive to actually limit the arguments to not whether NAT is good or bad, but what requirements are we not fulfilling which is leading people to NAT's as an acceptible alternative (cf Noel's post). Some people have obviously throw in the towel and would like to have NAT's/ALG's to replace or augment the end to end principle. Others aren't ready to give up on end to end. I think it's premature to declare the latter dead though. Some of the requirements have simply not been hashed out to any great degree. Fred's draft on operational renumbering is a great example of something for which there is more handwaving on our part than actual experience. That doesn't mean that it's a dead end though. All it means that it's something that still needs to be dealt with. After all of that is done can we actually have an intelligent argument about what the right path is. This is, IMO, quite literally a race. Mike