Paul Vixie wrote:
it's not as if NAT got killed because people in IETF objected to it.
yes, but do you think that was because that ietf was powerless to stop it, or
because that ietf was willing to let consenting adults try out new ideas? i
was there, and from what i saw, it was the former.
IETF has very little power, if you can call it that. IETF can try to
suggest good ways of doing things quickly enough that the good ways get
adopted before bad ways do, or it can recommend against bad ways of
doing things. The former is much more effective. It pretty much failed
to do either in the case of NAT. I remember a lot of concern being
expressed, but a strong reluctance to make any statement - perhaps due
to lack of consensus about how bad NATs were and what, if anything,
could be proposed as a better way.
it's more like IETF's unwillingness to look beyond NAT to the underlying
problems (other than address space exhaustion) that made NAT attractive
caused IETF to miss an opportunity to produce something better.
the underlying problem was that people in the field didn't want universality
among endpoints, either for security or policy reasons, and people in that
ietf wanted universality among endpoints -- a single addressing system and
a single connectivity realm. that ietf said, you don't really want that, you
should use the internet as it was intended, and solve the problems you're
having in some way that preserves universality of endpoints. the field said,
you are completely out of your minds, we're going to ignore ietf now. then
later on, ietf said, if you're going to do it, then we ought to help you with
some standards support.
That's not quite how I remember it from my POV. Some people were very
concerned about ambiguous addressing. I don't think universal
connectivity was as big a concern - it's not like IETF people expected
everyone to run open networks. But mostly there was a lot of unease
and uncertainty about NATs. Very little analysis was done. And I don't
think that NAPTs were initially seen as the normal case.
all it takes is a couple of loud or influential people to prevent consensus
from forming.
and quite often (not always, but often), those people are right.
which is why i'm proposing a standard of "demonstrable immediate harm" rather
than the current system of "that's not how you should do it" or "that's not
how i would do it".
That's the wrong standard, it sets the bar way too low. IETF shouldn't
endorse anything unless it has justification to believe it is good; IETF
should not discourage anything unless it has justification to believe it
is bad. And that justification should come from engineering analysis
(or measurement, if it's feasible). Sadly, a lot of people in IETF do
not have engineering backgrounds and don't understand how to do such
analysis. This is something we need to change in our culture.
Keith
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