dbasnett's questions

Given the following simplistic network

Network http://www.vbforums.com/picture.php?albumid=18&pictureid=47

[IMG]http://www.vbforums.com/picture.php?albumid=18&pictureid=47[/IMG]

Would it be possible to construct NAT / PAT pools such that the PC's attached to the network could be identified by their port number. I understand that if I assign a public IP to each user I can identify them. What I am trying to do is to conserve Public IP's, but maintain the ability to identify the user from the public network. If your answer is vendor specific that is OK with me. Thanks in advance.

More and more I see programmers developing web based applications that are based on what I call "ping-then-do" mentality. An example would be the application that pings the mail server before sending the mail. In a rather heated debate in another forum I made this statement, "If you are going to write programs that use the internet, you should at least have a basic idea of the fundamentals. The desire to "ping-then-do" tells me that many who are, don’t."

On this forum and at Stack Overflow I see numerous questions about ping / trace route and wonder why? If it is acceptable to have a discussion about it here I would like to hear what others think. If not I assume it will be closed rapidly.

One clarification - I want to be clear that I am talking about internet traffic, not private networks.

I asked this question at Stack Overflow and then thought this may be the better place to ask.

Given the following situation:

PC --- |aa RTR1 bb| --- |aa RTR2 bb| --- |aa RTR3 bb| etc

Each of the |aa rtr bb| is meant to be a router with two ports aa and bb.

My question is this. When you do a trace route from PC which router port address should respond with time to live exceeded in transit message?

I seem to remember being taught to think of the router as being in as many parts as ports, so that in my scenario when aa is forwarding the packet to bb and decrements the ttl to 0, it will be the address of the aa port in the failure message. I am trying to find the definitive answer.

Thanks.