The reason I raised the historical perspective is that so many people make arguments against NAT based on historical claims that are contrary to my recent conversations with David Clark amongst others. My position, which I have been fairly consistent in is that there is only one Internet namespace: the DNS. All other network namespaces are secondary. That is not something to rue, it is something to celebrate. Messing with the DNS is hard precisely because it will eventually become the uber-namespace that subsumes everything (even telephone numbers will go eventually). The architectural gain that we should be looking for in the IPv6 transition is to liberate the architecture from dependence on IP protocol. That will give us more flexibility to do interesting things at the IP level without having the oppressive weight of legacy deployment assumptions bearing down. The technical circumstances that favor packet switching as a paradigm are not necessarily constant as we go into realms such as cloud computing. I can well imagine circumstances where I want to have an IP tunnel to an endpoint that is living in the cloud with an intermediate circuit switched layer involved at some point. Deciding that IP is the only protocol for all time might be a mistake. On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 1:01 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <hallam@xxxxxxxxx> > > > The original architecture made no assumption that IP would run end to > > end, let alone that the IP address would be constant end to end. > > Say what? That's not my recollection at all. But this isn't the > Internet-History list, so I'll move on. > > > > I do not see any architectural value in insisting that applications > > assume that the IP address is constant from one end of a communication > > to the other. > > That's a complex question, and it depends in part on how many other > namespaces there are. > > > It is not a necessary assumption .. it is not one that any application > > protocol can rely on if it is to work on 99% of the Internet deployed > > today. > > Well, that is certainly true. > > > > IPv6 should be as little different to deployed IPv4 as possible. > > That has minuses as well as pluses, though. A big one is that if IPv6 is just > IPv4 with a few more bits of address, then you sort of limit the capability, > and therefore the benefits, of IPv6. No architectural changes -> no > new/additional capabilities. > > > Remember that the first rule of the Internet is: You are SO NOT in > > charge here (for all values of YOU). > > A powerful observation, one we should all remember... > > Noel > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > Ietf@xxxxxxxx > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf > -- -- New Website: http://hallambaker.com/ View Quantum of Stupid podcasts, Tuesday and Thursday each week, http://quantumofstupid.com/ _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf