P2P, Firewalls And Connection Splicing

dbarclay10 writes: "There's an interesting article over at Byte about what happens when nobody accepts incoming connections any more, like when more people start using firewalls or NAT. Specifically, it talks about peer-to-peer networking(a la Napster), and how it would be affected. Good read."

Comments

Good article but not much to worry about

[Sheepdot]

While I had a hard time understanding NAT, I'm beginning to learn that it is extremely versatile and a lot of times people, like the author, don't understand that it can be configurable in a lot of ways.

For our home connection, I set up a port for each of my roommates 4 computers and we use Napster through those.

What is even more interesting is that NAT will soon have unnoticed configuration itself. There has been work done to improve NAT translation so if a port is opened on an inside IP, a client can connect to the router and request that NAT redirect to that port.

I don't think IP masquerading is going to anything but get better over the next few years, and I trust it to be the best security with the most configuration in the future.

I don't believe the author of the article has realized that even with the Cisco 675, used for a large number of DSL connections, changes have been made to NAT such as one-time configuration of addresses.

What this new option allowed over previous versions of the bios was setting an inside NAT port and address and binding it to the routers IP. Before this, users would have to log in every time the routers IP had changed and continually change the NAT translation.

NAT is only going to get better folks. Don't worry about peer-to-peer sharing dying any time soon because of it.