VanLUG Email Archive
> What you're apparently saying is that in your experience people have
> not felt a need for a special word to designate the limited form of NAT
> that comes with common Linux distributions.
No, in fact large router vendors, who have boxes with the exact
same limitation, have not felt the need for this either. In fact,
no network professional I've ever met, or vendor, has ever used
`IP Masquerading'; as far as I can tell it's not a term used by
the general networking community. Linux folks simply spread confusion
when they use it to refer to the exact same thing that the rest of
the world refers to as NAT.
As I said, I'm open to counterexamples, and will eat my words if
someone can show me a major vendor like Cisco, Bay or Ascend, or
a major networking person such as Jon Postel, or an RFC, using that
term.
> I gather from other traffic in this thread that NAT software with the
> particular limitation that we've been discussing is not common in the
> BSD community....
Ahm. Please add `the rest of the world' to the BSD community. Thank you.
> > In other words, `NAT' is a term like `routing'; you don't find
> > people saying `this device is a foo, not a router, because it
> > doesn't handle ToS routing.'
>
> But do you find people saying `this device is a bridge, not a router,
> because it doesn't handle ...'?
Sure. How does that change the fact that the word `routing' covers
a wide range of routing behaviour, in the same way that the word
NAT covers a wide range of NAT behaviour?
> I find it easier to explain to a lay person than full-blown NAT, and I
> find it a convenient shorthand, just as I find "motorcycle" a convenient
> shorthand for "motor vehicle with two wheels."
You might also find `hullaboo' a convenient shorthand for `motor
vehicle with two wheels.'
cjs
-- Curt Sampson <
> 604-257-9400 De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil. Any opinions expressed are mine and mine alone. The most widely ported operating system in the world: http://www.netbsd.org