On 15 Nov 2007, at 04:37, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
On 15 nov 2007, at 8:27, David Kessens wrote:
PS as my personal opinion on NAT-PT, as long as we define it as
middlebox as opposed to a protocol that has strong interoperation
needs, I am not convinced that it actually even needs to be
standardized by IETF as it is perfectly possible to implement
NAT-PT without a stable IETF specification and to make it work
across the Internet.
We did that with NAT, and I think we lived to regret it.
In fact, I was thinking about adding text to my modified NAT-PT
draft to mandate some specific NAT behavior rather than letting the
vendors figure it out in order to make it easier for applications to
work around the problems that the NAT part in NAT-PT creates.
I also believe we are moving towards a consensus that a NAT-PT like
solution that purely exists in a middlebox is probably not workable
for exactly the reasons that RFC 4966 explains so changes on either
the IPv6 or IPv4 host that communicates through the NAT-PT
translator are required.
I agree that specifying the behaviour in reasonable detail is useful,
both so that users have a clear basis for evaluating and comparing
different implementations, and also so that application protocol
folks can have a more predictable behaviour.
NAT-like devices simply are not going to go away. Having a clear
and reasonably detailed specification for the behaviour of such
a device gives application protocol designers a better chance of
designing an application protocol that will work through whichever
devices get deployed.
If I look on the shelves at the big box geek store in Silly Valley,
there are bunches of different consumer gateway boxes at consumer
price points.
I can't easily find any consumer "gateway" box on the shelves there
that does not include IPv4 NAT or NAPT today. Operationally, the
behaviours do seem to differ somewhat. To the extent the behaviours
are similar or identical, then the application protocol designers
work is made easier.
Yours,
Ran
rja@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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