End Of the Line for SpeakFreely: NATed to Death

Arun writes "John Walker (of AutoDesk and Fourmilab fame), primary author of SpeakFreely, has decided to EOL the program (a pioneering network telephony effort), come January 15th, 2004. He cites difficulty in maintaining a decade-old code base, lack of appropriate developer support and a fundamental change in the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet upon which SF is dependent as motivating factors behind his decision. While the last release of the program will continue to be available from SourceForge, the main web site, mailing list, and web forum will be shut down on the aforementioned date." He's got some good points too, like how once IPv6 is more common, most users probably won't go back to one address per machine. I know I enjoy the added security of a NATed firewall, and without a really good reason, I won't be quick to give it up.

Comments

Whining galore

[Jailbrekr]

But isn't the problem really the lack of static port mapping, not NAT? (If you don't understand this question, please skip to the next.) Correct, but experience has shown that a large number of installed NAT boxes either cannot map an externally accessible port to an internal IP address and port, or those who install the boxes do not provide their customers adequate information to permit them to do this. Given the trend, discussed in the last question, toward confining individual Internet users to a consumer role, I believe fewer and fewer users will have the ability to statically map ports as time goes on.

I call BULLSHIT. Each and every firewall/nat box I have worked with supports reverse port mapping, DMZ, or uPnP. It sounds like he is having trouble adapting to the changing technology.