[Wiltshire] August meeting

[David Corking]

Mike Paglia :
> Secondly there is no reason to do so at this point as NAT is a perfectly
> good way of solving the IP shortage problem.

Allow me to disagree.  It seems to me that the use of
dynamically-assigned IP addresses, followed shortly after by the
widespread use of NAT, has set back peer-to-peer applications for
several years, perhaps a decade.

You may remember back when every desktop PC had a fixed public IPv4
address.  Back then, everyone with a webcam had installed cuseeme, a
very simple video phone app, and users could call each other with
little fuss.

Yet a year or two later, many of us struggled to get NetMeeting, VoIP
and so on working across a net that made each desktop a second-class
citizen?

By the mid 2000s there were numerous effective workarounds, but we are
left with a landscape of incompatible applications and several
proprietary or complex protocols, that often require extensive
tweaking and troubleshooting of routers to work.