Automatic NAT Traversal!

Damien Stolarz writes:

As some of you may know, I am on the p2p working group, and I am working on a white paper on how p2p apps can work better with NAT/Firewalls. The UPNP group, has apparently been working on something that allows NAT traversal automatically. I am excited to have the first press release on these lines. You can "read between the lines" and try to figure out how they do it technically, as some of the data requires membership in UPNP forum.

http://www.linksys.com/press/press.asp?prid=45&cyear=2001
"In addition to the overall advantages UPnP brings to its product line, one compelling reason Linksys will include UPnP support in its Internet gateway products is to ensure that applications traversing the Internet gateway simply work. Network Address Translation (NAT) is an Internet Engineering Task Force standard used in Internet gateways, such as cable and DSL routers, to help service providers cope with the decreasing number of available IP addresses. Some applications do not work well with NAT, which creates customer satisfaction issues and high support costs. Using UPnP to control the behavior of NAT, Linksys ensures these applications traversing the gateway are enabled in a transparent fashion for the user. "

I will forward more data on this issue as it comes out.

My hopes:

• UPNP NAT traversal techniques become public
• ipchains and other software NAT implementations get this same UPNP feature
• older NAT systems that have other front ends (web, telnet, SNMP) get compatibility libs that emulate the UPNP services and enable traversal in the same way