> From: Joe Touch <touch@xxxxxxx>
> "what people want" (ISP operators, or at least some of them), was an
> artificial way to differentiate home customers from commercial
> providers.
> I.e., they wanted to create a differentiation that wasn't part of the
> Internet architecture, so they put one in.
> NATs did other things ... but IMO mostly as a by-product of this
> primary motivation.
I'm not so sure about that.
For the first couple of years that I had an ISP connection (which soon had an
early NAT box on it), whenever I called up the ISP (then, and still, one of
the largest in the US) with a service call, the first thing I had to do was
unplug the NAT box and plug in a host directly!
It was only after everyone's house had multiple PC's (which was really only
after wireless became common - I don't think too many people were willing to
wire their houses for Ethernet :-) that they kind of expected there to be a
NAT box there.
But in any event, it's doesn't void my point: if people want something, we
have two choices: i) blow people off, and they'll adopt some point solution
that interacts poorly with everything else, or ii) give people the
_capabilities_ they need/want (and thereby have some chance at minimizing the
brain damage - since generally people don't care _how_ it works, as long as it
_does_ what they want).
I guess this is just a long-winded, engineering take on 'the customer is
always right'.
Noel