the alleged evils of NAT,

"John R. Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> writes:
>> Did you run any services?
>
> Of course not, it's consumer DSL. I run services on my server which is
> somewhere else and tunnel in via ssh which, of course, works fine
> through NAT.

Take a look at all those small SOHO storage boxes. They all offer web
and FTP services and they all support something like dyndns. Customers
want these features and are using these features.

For any such feature on such devices, it would be more honest for the
purposes of debate to state that as "Some customers want these features
[...]" which is completely true.

There are a lot of features in a lot of devices that are never used by
(a few, some, most, etc) end users, and even where they are used, the
existence of web or ftp services on a storage appliance may merely mean
that a user finds it more convenient to access the device locally that
way... rather than setting up SMB etc. It certainly does not imply
that all customers who buy the SuperStorageDeviceWithFTPCapability are
running public FTP archives and that NAT becomes a problem for the
owners of all those devices. It may be a problem for a percentage of
them, though.

... JG