inline.
Michael Richardson wrote:
I agree with Melinda.
I would very much like to be able to let the desk clerk at the hotel know that I won't be paying for their "Internet" service, because it wasn't RFCxxxx compliant. (I now wish that someone did get the trademark on that word, and would deny it to locations that offer only NATwork service)
Well, I suspect the hotel clerk won't understand and certainly won't care what an RFC is. But, their service provider does, and I'm more hopeful that the RFP's and RFI's they produce and send to their vendors includes a statement that their NATs need to be RFCxxxx compliant, because it increases the ability of their networks to support applications that are ultimately driving demand for those networks.
That's the only value I see in this situation. For the the vendors that have a clue, and will likely be involved in this process, they are likely already compliant. For those that aren't compliant, they won't be there. That's tough for them.
Actually, it's surprisingly more complicated than one might think to determine what the "right" thing is, in terms of NAT behavior and treatment of basic protocols such as UDP. Even clueful vendors appear to have differing treatments even within the same product families [1]. For some of these behaviors, such as the UDP binding timeout interval, there is value in trying to shepherd everyone to arrive at a common minimal value (as in, the binding timeout MUST be greater than X). For that example, it's not an issue of clueful or clueless implementations, but rather, getting folks at a consistent value. That is exactly what standards are for.
Thanks, Jonathan R.
[1] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-jennings-midcom-stun-results-01.txt
-- Jonathan D. Rosenberg, Ph.D. 600 Lanidex Plaza Chief Technology Officer Parsippany, NJ 07054-2711 dynamicsoft jdrosen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx FAX: (973) 952-5050 http://www.jdrosen.net PHONE: (973) 952-5000 http://www.dynamicsoft.com
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