Re: IPv6 NAT?

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inline:

Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> On 15 feb 2008, at 20:43, Dan Wing wrote:
> 
>> Such 1-for-1 address rewriting does not provide the topology
>> hiding that many people seem to like of their existing NAPT
>> devices, nor does such 1-for-1 address rewriting obscure the
>> number of hosts behind the NAT.  Such obscuring can be useful
>> for certain businesses (there are, today, small ISPs in certain
>> countries that do not want their country's PTT to know the
>> ISP's actual market share, for fear tarrifs or advertising to
>> compete with the small ISP will be increased).
> 
> So how far, exactly, are you prepared to bend over backwards and crack  
> the spine of the IP architecture to accommodate 0.01% or so of its  
> users? Not to mention the cost increases for all the extra protocol  
> layers and debugging that must be borne by the other 99.99%?

Its not for me or you to decide. The issue is, will the people who 
operate these networks decide that they want NAT. And then it is for 
IETF to decide about whether they would like to engineer protocols that 
actually work on the networks that those administrators have built.

A big mistake was made in IPv4, where NAT was declared 'evil' and we 
didn't spend enough time defining it well. Now, it is wildly successful 
and a part of what the Internet is, and it is harder to deal with it. 
Had we done standards work up front and early, and defining exactly how 
NAT work, things would work much better. We should have had RFC4787 in 
1997 and NOT 2007.

And now, we face the same dilemma with IPv6. Do we continue to deny the 
possibility of IPv6 NAT? Do we decide NOT to standardize it? Have we not 
learned our lesson from the first time around?

So, I think it would be good to define IPv6 NAT behavior, and do so NOW 
before its too late, and define it in a way that it would appeal to the 
admins that have deployed IPv4 NAT today. Worst case, it doesn't get 
used and we have this nice utopian NAT-free IPv6 network. Can you say 
the same for the worst-case situation for NOT standardizing v6 NAT?

-Jonathan R.



"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting 
different results."
--Albert Einstein
-- 
Jonathan D. Rosenberg, Ph.D.                   499 Thornall St.
Cisco Fellow                                   Edison, NJ 08837
Cisco, Voice Technology Group
jdrosen@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.jdrosen.net                         PHONE: (408) 902-3084
http://www.cisco.com
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