[arin-ppml] Stepping forward, opening my mouth and removing all doubt about

[William Herrin]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 10:25 AM, Kevin Kargel <kkargel at polartel.com> wrote:
> Speaking as a system administrator for an ISP..  The number of customers who
> during the course of a year use applications that would be negatively
> affected by nat is more in the range of 80 to 100 %..
>
> Flame this if you want.. I am speaking from experience having tried it..

Kevin,

Would you settle for questions which challenge you to document your
claims instead?


> Instant messaging

Which widely used IM systems do you find have trouble when the clients
are behind a NAT firewall? Certainly not AIM, Yahoo messenger, Google
chat or IRC. DCC has some issues, but now you've crossed into P2P file
transfer rather than IM.

> online gaming (like yahoo and msn games),

Which Yahoo or MSN games malfunction when access is attempted from
behind a NAT firewall?


>game consoles,

Which game consoles malfunction when access is attempted from behind a
NAT firewall? The standard deployment for DSL and cable modems is to
send out a "DSL router" which implements a local NAT firewall and all
three manufacturers knew that when they designed the current
generation of consoles. Would you have us believe that Microsoft, Sony
and Nintendo built and deployed game consoles which require
extraordinary action to get on the Internet?

> VOIP,

Other than Skype (see P2P apps), what widely used VOIP services
malfunction when the client is behind a NAT firewall? Definately not
Vonage. I used it for years behind NAT+PPPoE.

> VPN,

Which widely used VPN client products malfunction when the client is
behind a NAT firewall? Certainly not Microsoft's PPtP client nor
Cisco's VPN client nor open source solutions like OpenVPN. I've used
all of these without difficulty from behind NAT firewalls.


> p2p applications,
> web cam videoconference,

And you believe that more than 80% of your users use applications in
these two categories? What's your basis for this claim? Have your
surveyed your users? Performed traffic analysis to match well known
applications to user accounts?


> followed by a host of other applications..  Almost all of my residential
> customers use one or more applications in this ilk at least occasionally.

Not unless your user base is comprised of a disproportionate number of
techies. I'll concede that possibility, but if true it negates the
utility of your observations for establishing a baseline for the
percentage of users who directly need globally routable IP addresses.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com bill at herrin.us
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