On Thu, 2010-09-09 at 16:45 -0400, dwgallien wrote:
Btw, seems that this discussion has moved to the religious debate stage. Can we at least hold off the snark?
Perhaps it sounds that way, but Adam is correct on all technical points and so he should absolutely not allow anyone to get the idea that the dissenting opinions hold any water if he cares about accuracy of documentation and the safety of others. If the inarguability of facts looks like the unshakability of faith, well that's just too bad for those who practice faith in things other than facts. Why should he or anyone else care if anyone else understands the issues here? Because unfortunately none of us exists alone. One cannot simply opt to do the right thing while allowing others to be stupid if they want. I can't use .odt, .ogg, and .ogv files which would be better for _everyone_ if we all did, because too many of the people I must interact with don't understand and don't care why they should not use .xls, .mp3, and h264 files because as far as they can tell it "works for them". When too many people don't understand something and/or don't care to even try to understand, then the broken system that popularity==validity results in the knowledgeable minority being forced by circumstances outside their control to live with, participate in, and even commit, broken crap themselves even though they know better and are willing to do better.
That's fine, it seems I was not clear: My comment was a general one re a nbr of the posts, not directed towards anyone in particular. I thought that was implied.
Well, when I said "It seems a lot of people are very much confusing the functionality of a router, a firewall, and NAT." I meant exactly that; no snark intended. The comments about NAT *clearly* indicate a failure to distinguish between NAT, firewall, and routing [three different capabilities]. Routing - moving packets. IPv6 allows 'normal' routing between any two points [which NAT breaks]. Firewalls - control access [not NAT]. Being routable [and theoretically reachable] is not the same as being accessible. Most "firewalls" support NAT, that doesn't make a firewall and NAT the same thing. Firewalls can be positioned at *routed* ingress/egress points, so the every-device-must-be-firewalled arguement is bogus [although it isn't a bad idea - even in an IPv4 NAT'd world]. NAT - a hack to allow use of private IPv4 ranges to access resources outside the local subnet. NAT breaks good things like GRE tunnels, and SCTP [anyone want a faster Internet?] - even outgoing, it isn't just an inbound issue. NAT breaks the topology, and if the address-space constraint is removed - adds nothing. <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1627.html> <http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/what-nats-break.html>
A technical debate on the facts and perceived merits is welcome. However, it is neither advanced nor enhanced by language that personalizes, condescends, or insults. I was just hoping to calm the waters a bit. Apparently I failed, so let's leave it at that.
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