Noel Chiappa wrote:
Having read it, I think this story is pretty accurate - and that's probably
why some people here are upset about it.
It's not the accurate parts I'm upset about. From the article:
> The Internet engineering community working on IPv6 is considering
> reintroducing NAT - one of the very features that the upgrade to IP
> was meant to eliminate.
"Reintroducing" is very misleading here, because it implies that the use
of network address translation to allow a v4 host to communicate with v6
host has more than a superficial similarity with the use of NAT in IPv4
as a stopgap measure to deal with address scarcity.
> Internet purists hate NAT because it breaks the end-to-end nature of
> the Internet.
That should say "Internet pragmatists hate IPv4 NAT because it prevents
many kinds of applications from working without adding considerable
complexity and cost in the form of additional code and infrastructure,
and because the introduction of IPv4 NAT and the additional complexity
required to deal with it impairs performance and decreases reliability."
But these limitations don't inherently apply to NAT between v4 and v6,
particularly not when the v4 address is a public one.
Keith
p.s. there's a whole other discussion to be had about how the IPv6
feature set was chosen - e.g. why concerns like WAN routing scalability
trumped other very valid concerns like incremental deployability, and
how those choices affected the market's acceptance of IPv6. IMHO we're
still not very good at balancing long-term concerns vs. short-term ones
in IETF.
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