Gimme a break – we’re

Gimme a break – we’re not all that stupid.  Not NATty at AT&T Broadband: in the latest move to demonstrate their lack of technical understanding, AT&T Broadband is offering full-price networking gear from Linksys for their customers with NAT disabled. If you want to buy it at full list from AT&T, you have to pay $4.95 per additional machine on your network. The upside: these machines get real, routable IPs. The downside: very, very few consumer machines require static IPs and, in fact, would be better served with nonroutable addresses as the first stage in firewalling themselves. (The second stage would be a personal firewall package like ZoneAlarm for Windows or Intego NetBarrier for Mac.) The AT&T guy quoted in the link above said they typically track problems back to NAT, and they can’t access machines for troubleshooting that are NAT’d. I’d agree with the first point; misconfigured NAT is probably a good reason why machines couldn’t see the Net, but it’s more likely DHCP configuration on the client machine that’s the problem. As for the second, if I were an ISP of any variety, I’d have a simple program for Mac, Windows, and Linux that a user could run at their discretion that would diagnose network ills and, if it could reach a Net (via NAT or not), send some diagnostic information to me. That makes sense. No NAT? Not.