[Techtalk] Good firewall configuration tool for debian

[Mary]

On Fri, Apr 09, 2004, Devdas Bhagat wrote:
> On 09/04/04 10:18 -0700, Carla Schroder wrote:
> > NAT is lovely, not evil. You have only one exposed public IP address, the
> NAT is evil. It breaks the peer to peer nature of the Internet.

Let's break with the morality analogy. I will rephrase Carla's statement
as "NAT is necessary." It's necessary for all those poor unfortunates
who live in countries or work in institutions that didn't realise how
horrible NAT is in time to grab themselves a huge proportion of
available IPv4 addresses. That is, pretty much everyone outside the US
and a lot of people in it.

Until IPv6 arrives en masse, a lot of people on either residential class
connections or in countries that don't have a high ratio of routable IP
addresses to resident computers are going to be using NAT, and aren't
going to be having a lot of choice about it, unless you define thousands
of dollars extra as a reasonable price to pay for a routable class C and
the presevation of peer to peer connections.

-Mary