On 21/03/2009, at 3:18 AM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
On 19 mrt 2009, at 7:43, Lixia Zhan"
Are we ready to adopt the policy that forbids IPv6 NAT traversal
mechanisms?
no.
This industry needs standards, and relies on standards.
For many years the Internet Engineering Task Force has viewed
standardization of NATs and their behaviour as being an action that
would encourage further deployment of a technology that was apparently
considered undesireable. The result has been that NATs have been
deployed for reasons entirely unconnected with the IETF and
standardization. However, because the original specification of NAT
behaviour was at such a general level, each NAT implementor has been
forced into making local decisions as to how the NAT should behave
under specific circumstances. We now enjoy a network with widespread
deployment of an active device that does not have consistent
implementations and, in the worst cases, exhibits non-deterministic
behaviours. This has made the task of deployment of certain
applications on the Internet, including voice-based applications,
incredibly difficult.
Whether NATs are good or bad, they’d be less of a collective headache
today if they shared a common standard core behaviour. NATs for IPv6
may be felt to be unnecessary today, and it can be argued they
represent no real value to an IPv6 site. But a collection of IPv6 NAT
implementations with no common core behaviour would be a far worse of
problem for applications and their users. Standardization of
technology at least eliminates some of the worst aspects of
application-level guesswork out of technology deployment.
regards
Geoff
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