Re: RFC-1918, NATs and games

[David Bannister <dbannist () cisco com>]

At 03:50 PM 6/9/97 -0700, Justin W. Newton wrote:
> At 04:24 PM 6/9/97 GMT, William Allen Simpson wrote:
> > Speaking as the designer of the network portion of a couple of those
> > popular games, the applications are _not_ broken.  Sending the IP
> > addresses is the only working method to dynamically join and redirect
> > multiplayer games.
>
> This is getting off-topic, but is there any reason that src address in the
> packet header doesn't work?  Most (yes, all, I'm being silly) packets have
> the src address set in the header, and it seems as if it would be a
> reliable way to determine the uniqueness of a stream, seeing as that is how
> this strange proprietary protocol named IP does it.  What am I missing?

In the cases he is referring to addresses are passed at the application
level from the client initiating the call. For example, here is a list of
popular programs that pass addressing information at that level:

ftp
cuseeme
irc
real audio
quake

NAT can break these applications and special handling must be done to make
them work. 

> Justin W. Newton
> Senior Network Architect
> Priori Networks                                http://www.priori.net
> ISP/C, Director at Large                       http://www.ispc.org

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