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arittr

"One thing you can rely on with IPv4: whatever the problem, Network Address Translation is part of the solution."

NAT... the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.

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"I know, I'll use NAT!" Now you have two problems.

(Just in case you don't recognize the allusion:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/what-...

Posts from Ars say, pre-2018/2017 should be left alone. No need to remind ourselves about how far they've fallen.

I immediately thought of this line from my favorite episode of Everybody Love Raymond. Ray's dad says: "Didn't I teach you anything, you gotta problem with your woman you don't go out and get another one. Then you got two problems."

That episode aired in 2001. I wonder if the NAT quote is inspired by that?

The original quote was about regexps, not NAT. But I have no idea whether JWZ invented it or was took it from ELR.

Full story here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5188060>

I thought it was always DNS?

I thought it's BGP? Or maybe that's just the cause of all problems, hmm...

My understanding of BGP is that it’s so old (and was relatively well designed) that it could now be considered an arcane magic once widespread but now only known by some old wizards.

The problem with both is that they were both designed long ago, without much regard to bad actors. They have been around so long replacing would be a herculean effort.

For some reason whenever I interview very junior candidates - every _single_ one of them has BGP on their resume as a skill.

0% of them have correctly been able to explain what BGP is used for.

Junior candidates for what position?

Would answer "I use it host servers at home and have load-balanced access to internet via several end-users ISPs(no BGP sessions with ISPs so 2 VPN tunnels from home to server + 2 BGP sessions from home to said server via tunnels and server itself have session with it's ISP) count?" :)

Would "I'm just getting lists of IPs blocked by local censorship authority/IPs which are better to access via IP from OTHER country to put them all in VPN" count? :)

p.s. I'm not network admin and never put "BGP" on resume.

> Or maybe that's just the cause of all problems, hmm...

It sure is the cause of some of the worst problems.

Yes, but it's also an issue with IPv6. NAT is nearly always involved with whenever you touch IPv4.

You could easily get away with IPv6 only networks in some countries.

That'a just all the problems, no solutions.

It's usually NAT, with DNS as a very close second place.

NAT is great. I can think of no problems caused by NAT. I can immediately think of my experiences with IPv6 and all loss of privacy.

Can't tell whether this is trolling or serious. Breaking the end-to-end principle has had profound effects on the Internet as a whole for the last 2 decades, centralization being the most obvious one.

I used to keep a copy of this paper with me: <https://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoe...>

Trolling? No. NAT breaks something? No. IPv6 breaks privacy at a minimum and probably opens our devices to security issues. IPv6 is what's broken.

That's not how any of this works.

Citation needed on "breaking privacy". You have at least 2^64 IPv6 addresses per household, cycle through them and stop worrying about IP tracking.

Oh, and I can give citation on how NAT breaks something. Until the day we can magically remove application-level gateways[0] I consider NAT a fundamentally broken hack.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-level_gateway

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or another "I like NAT because I can't be bothered to deploy a firewall rule" comment.

I said nothing about a firewall. I use firewalls everywhere. I use NAT. What I don't use is IPv6.

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