Re: Doomed to eternal limbo
I grant that NAT breaks many protocols. The problem is that many of those protocols from before NAT was taken into account aren't very useful anymore as they were. Take your chat protocols. They would still work, but few people will use them. Why? Well, most of us now use devices which might move around, from laptops to phones. We probably want chat messages to come to us wherever we may be, without having to have dynamic DNS attached to our personal machines. Our address will keep changing, so merely identifying an address is a little painful. For that reason, a lot of old chat systems used a central server that associated names with addresses. Yes, a central server, so it wasn't purely P2P. And that just fixes the discovery problem. What about storing messages if the device is offline? For the chat purpose, using a central server is usually not a problem.
There are other protocols that could benefit from a direct connection, but there are also ways of creating that with NAT in place. Some of them pipe all the data through a central server, but many others use that server only to identify a pathway between devices which is then used without the server's involvement.
NAT isn't good everywhere. I like it on my own network, but I don't like it on my ISP. Since we don't have sufficient IPV4 addresses for all the individual users and machines we want to be addressable, IPV6 is likely our best path to not having that problem. That doesn't diminish the benefits of NAT. To the adoption of both.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
