An Opinion in Defence of NATs

potaroo.net

2 pointsanecdotal13 comments

In my mind, Tailscale has undone most of the damage that NATs have done.

A lot of people thought IPv6 tunnels would solve it, but they underestimated the MTU issues it brings.

There's a complementary video that goes along with this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qyTtSY7c4k

I agree with Geoff here that your address needs to be treated like a session identifier not a permanent endpoint identifier like a phone number. We need to migrate to a better name based addressing system, really. DNS isn't evolving because we thought IPv6 would solve it. We shouldn't have unique names AND unique addresses. Unique names should be enough.

As it is I am not happy with the state of naming, particularly if you want to overlay local names on a LAN. For one thing, you can't could today that you can point every device to point to a DNS server you control.

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