RE: How the IPnG effort was started
2004-11-23 18:40:53
At 12:07 PM 11/21/2004, Peter Ford wrote:
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Noel,
You are sorely under-representing the IETF's and your own efforts wrt
NATs. I think of your taxonomic study of NATs much in the same vein as
Carl Linnaeus's "Systema Naturae".
In fact, given the intellectual contributions by the think tank inside the
IETF to NATs, the working groups on NATs, and the protocol engineering for
NATs devised in the IETF, one would think that we can credit the IETF with
NATs and the emergent Internet NAT architecture, guided by the IESG and
overseen by the IAB.
The IETF NAT Working Group was formed to document the many technologies
which were being labelled as NAT and provide some common reference. We also
produced documentation on how to design protocols that can transit NATs
without help, and document what things were broken by NAT. The WG did NOT
develop NAT.
The IETF did, however, have a lot to do with limiting the availability of
IPv4 address space, which pushed people to consider building NAT devices.
Proteon did a lot of work in 1993 - 1994.
One of the more interesting things we may encounter in the post-IPv4 era
is a great simplication, but not elimination of NATs. In other words:
NATs become strictly address re-writers for IPv6 addresses. And yes,
some of the ongoing research in NAT architecture will probably make it
into the IPv6 world. I can easily imagine a world where hosts use NATs
and IPv6 simultaneously and I suspect this might be a next-gen firewall
technology. People seem to forget that people buy NATs for IP address
sharing and firewalling. They don't seem to "get it" that there are
very few people who would ever buy a NAT because of IPv4 address limitations.
Actually, I expect NATs will survive for a very long time as the low-cost
way to multihome. Many devices are on the market today which provide
multiported NAT with 2 or more upstream ISPs routing a single address or
subnet to a port on the device, and with the device performing NAT, load
balancing and other functions all in one box. Certainly this will be a
simpler solution for users within many organizations than trying to deploy
the multi6 schemes with multiple addresses on every machine.
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