Re: terminology proposal: NAT+PT

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As far as I'm concerned, NAT-PT is defined in RFC 2766, and describes a
particular way of translating between IPv4 and IPv6.  If people are
using NAT-PT in a different way, that's unfortunate.   But I don't
consider it a major problem because NAT-PT really isn't usable anyway,
for two sets of reasons: (1) for any kind of NAT approach to be
generally applicable, applications need to be explicitly aware of NAT;
have explicit awareness of, and control over, bindings in the NAT; and
be able to distinguish one addressing realm from another and know which
addresses are in which realms.   NAT-PT doesn't do the first two, and
it's arguable that it doesn't do the third. (2) lying about DNS results,
which NAT-PT does, is always a Bad Idea and should be strongly discouraged.

If someone wants to define a different mechanism to translate between
IPv4 and IPv6, it needs a different name to avoid confusion with
NAT-PT.  I don't like NAT+PT as a name, because it's too easily confused
with NAT-PT.  (I don't like DVD-RW and DVD+RW either, but I expect that
was a case of deliberately trying to cause confusion in the marketplace.)

Keith
> NAT, NAPT, and NAT-PT have been used for some while now to refer
> to various sorts of address/port translation within an IPv4-only
> network.
>
> Recently, there has been some discussion of network address with
> IPv6::IPv4 protocol translation.  Some have referred to that as
> NAT-PT also, which can be confusing to some.
>
> I'd like to suggest that when talking about the concept of
> translating protocol versions (IPv6 <-> IPv4) in addition
> to, or instead of, altering port number or IP address, we
> use the short-hand notation "NAT+PT".
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ran
>
> (PS:  Perhaps I've been burning too many DVDs lately. :-)
>
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