ietf
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: US DoD and IPv6

2010-10-06 12:44:09

On Oct 6, 2010, at 1:22 PM, Fernando Gont wrote:

On 06/10/2010 01:43 p.m., Keith Moore wrote:

Honestly, I don't think we can tell.  In the short term, it certainly
doesn't look good for end-to-end transparency.    But unlike 10 years
ago, today there's a widespread understanding of the problems caused
by lack of transparency, and much less denial about it.

It's not clear to me what you mean by "end to end transparency". If you
mean "end to end connectivity", then I'd say that quite a few people are
actually *concerned* about going back to end-to-end connectivity.

I mean having the sender's packets delivered to the receiver, completely intact 
except for ordinary TTL and IP option processing, with "best effort" or better 
reliability, delay, and jitter, except when prohibited by explicit 
end-user-specified policy.

The central problem with the Internet seems to be that nearly
everybody who routes traffic thinks it's okay to violate the
architecture and alter the traffic to optimize for his/her specific
circumstances - and the end users and their wide variety of
applications just have to cope with the resulting brain damage.

When applications that e.g. include point of attachment addresses in the
app protocol break in the presence of NATs, one should probably ask
whether the NAT is breaking the app, or whether the NAT is making it
clear that the app was actually already broken.

It's perfectly reasonable for applications to include IP addresses and port 
numbers in their payloads, as this is the only way that the Internet 
Architecture defines to allow applications to make contact with particular 
processes at particular hosts.  Some might see this as a deficiency in the 
Internet Architecture, but that's the best that we have to work with for now.

DNS has never been, and never will be, suitable as a general endpoint naming 
mechanism.   And so far nobody has managed to implement and deploy a better 
system for endpoint naming.  If and when someone manages to do this, there will 
still be a need for old applications to use IP addresses.

Meanwhile, those who insist on corrupting other parties' traffic and harming 
their applications are very good examples of the kind of short-term, 
self-serving harm to which I was referring.  

Keith

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf