Re:Why?

I am not here to defend NAT, but...(and I can't resist answering a 
blue-sky subject line)
At 7:53 -0600 3/11/05, JORDI PALET MARTINEZ wrote:

> IPv6 is an innovation opportunity, and makes life more simple to everyone,
> and consequently can generate more business.
I mean this as a reality check, not an argument.

"makes life more simple to everyone" is a subjective statement. 
There are some people that get comfortable with a way of doing 
business or solving a problem.  These people are generally not 
engineers, and are more likely to be in operations.  I am not saying 
the operators are anti-innovation, but if your job is operations, a 
stable environment is a good environment.  "The devil you know is 
better than the devil (or angel) you don't."
> The ISPs need to look IPv6 as a way to aggregate services and applications
> and get a couple of extra euros for every service, every month, form every
> customer. This can make a huge difference, specially when the revenues for
> the access price are going down and down (and the bandwidth high and high),
> and consequently they will not even able to cover the access cost with that
> fees.
My comment is not directed at the revenue end of the "business" but 
at the staffing end of the business.  The pool of unemployed 
operators-to-be (generalizing) is more aware of how to manage NAT'd 
networks than the pool of those knowing new (pick'em) technology. 
I.e., operations managers can and should deal with innovation, 
rank-and-file workers aren't employed to change the world.
> What we can do about that ?
Get operators involved.  Not just ISPs but enterprises - medium to 
power users.  You're not going to get the small and personal users, 
they don't have time for the IETF.
Getting operators involved does not mean reading internet drafts.  It 
means engaging them in dialog, deriving operational requirements from 
them.  It means inviting and baiting them into workshops.  (They 
won't show just because you email them, you have to get them to show.)
I am saying this from the experience of DNSSEC, that long-lived 
project to extend DNS.  In retrospect, one reason it has taken so 
long is that initially it was defined by security experts without the 
input of operators.  Operators have come into the fold and now there 
is an operations-friendly proposal.  But operators don't come as one 
unified bloc, new operators come to the table all the time with more 
input.  This is why there are still discussions over details in the 
protocol.
I realize that NAT breaks the theoretical idea of the network layer 
being end-to-end and I realize the consequences.  All protocols would 
be simpler if universal addressing was a reality, as the textbooks 
say it should be.  If life were like the textbooks, extending 
features would be fun and easy, a thousand flows would bloom.
But reality isn't according to theory.  The Internet with NAT, 
"split-brain" DNS, firewalls, etc., and a client-server mentality is 
proving useful to many folks today.  As engineers we have to deal 
with that, not ignore it, as we try to innovate further.
To make this clear - I am not saying I want to protect NAT, etc.  I 
think it is foolish to engineer as if it was a nuisance.


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Edward Lewis                                                +1-571-434-5468
NeuStar

Achieving total enlightenment has taught me that ignorance is bliss.

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