As far as I'm concerned, NAT-PT is defined in RFC 2766, and describes a
particular way of translating between IPv4 and IPv6. If people are
using NAT-PT in a different way, that's unfortunate. But I don't
consider it a major problem because NAT-PT really isn't usable anyway,
for two sets of reasons: (1) for any kind of NAT approach to be
generally applicable, applications need to be explicitly aware of NAT;
have explicit awareness of, and control over, bindings in the NAT; and
be able to distinguish one addressing realm from another and know which
addresses are in which realms. NAT-PT doesn't do the first two, and
it's arguable that it doesn't do the third. (2) lying about DNS results,
which NAT-PT does, is always a Bad Idea and should be strongly discouraged.
If someone wants to define a different mechanism to translate between
IPv4 and IPv6, it needs a different name to avoid confusion with
NAT-PT. I don't like NAT+PT as a name, because it's too easily confused
with NAT-PT. (I don't like DVD-RW and DVD+RW either, but I expect that
was a case of deliberately trying to cause confusion in the marketplace.)
Keith
NAT, NAPT, and NAT-PT have been used for some while now to refer
to various sorts of address/port translation within an IPv4-only
network.
Recently, there has been some discussion of network address with
IPv6::IPv4 protocol translation. Some have referred to that as
NAT-PT also, which can be confusing to some.
I'd like to suggest that when talking about the concept of
translating protocol versions (IPv6 <-> IPv4) in addition
to, or instead of, altering port number or IP address, we
use the short-hand notation "NAT+PT".
Cheers,
Ran
(PS: Perhaps I've been burning too many DVDs lately. :-)
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