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- From: cliff@garnet.berkeley.edu (Cliff Frost)
- Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
- Subject: Re: Firewall usage (was: Re: ping works, but ftp/telnet get "no route)
- Date: 27 Jul 1992 21:12:36 GMT
- Organization: University of California, Berkeley
- Lines: 34
- Distribution: world
- Message-ID: <151os4INNm3n@agate.berkeley.edu>
- References: <BrruC8.FEo@spock.dis.cccd.edu> <BrsM1C.36v@cs.columbia.edu> <1992Jul23.142026.20112@sci34hub.sci.com> <1992Jul24.161006.12786@practic.com>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: garnet.berkeley.edu
-
- |>
- |> >>I wish I had a transcript of Dave Clark's talk at the IETF last week.
- |> >>He said some great things about firewall gateways and mailbridges, and
- |> >>how they've essentially destroyed the whole purpose of having an IP
- |> >>internet, and have forced a lot of us to use mail as a transport-level
- |> >>protocol.
- |>
- |> Dave is usually correct, but as he thinks quite a bit more than many, and
- |> says what he thinks, he is frequently not correct. Send him mail and ask
- |> for a copy, or invite him to write. Perhaps he's been misstated in this
- |> summary of his remarks.
-
- Yes, I believe Dave Clark's points have been somewhat twisted in this
- discussion.
-
- What I thought I heard him say is that good host security is very important
- because without it people are forced to use firewalls and mail relays. It's
- hard to argue this point, and Dave Clark most certainly did *not* criticize
- anyone for using firewalls or mail relays.
-
- The follow on point (which ji referred to), is that IP (and UDP/TCP and
- the support infrastructure) was designed for end-to-end connectivity, so
- firewalls and mail relays break the architectural model. It's pretty hard
- to argue with this also.
-
- For a common example of the problems this creates, consider the DNS.
- The DNS is designed so that all hosts get the same answer to the same
- query. This is a problem for people who have corporate internets hidden
- from The Internet, because they often want the corporate machines to get
- one set of info from the DNS and for machines on The Internet to get a
- different set of info. The most common example is MX records, of course.
-
- Cliff Frost
- UC Berkeley
-