On Apr 7, 2012, at 2:30 40PM, Carlos M. Martinez wrote:
Sorry for arriving late at the party.
If people want NAT so badly, let them have it. It will be better to have a
standardized NATv6 than the multiple, non-standard and sometimes downright
bizarre implementations of NAT we have now. Just keep it in a way such as
that the future Internet MUST be a place were NATs are OPTIONAL and not
FORCED down one's throat like they are now.
The problem is that protocol designs these days have to account for NAT, which
often makes things far more complicated than necessary.
I also believe that if ULAs hadn't been named ULAs but RFC1918 for IPv6 or
"private IPv6 space" we wouldn't be having much of this conversation. Many,
many people outside these IETF mailing lists just don't grok that ULAs are
little more than that. I also tend to panic a little when people want to
deprecate ULAs. I just don't see the point of doing this, while I keep seeing
a lot of use cases for private space.
I hate NATs with port translation on single public IPs. Things break, many
times inexplicably. People have this rather inexplicable warm feeling that
they are somewhat 'safer' behind NATs. I picture them standing in front of a
tornado with an umbrella in hand and feeling protected.
However, I can live with prefix translation, in fact, I believe it can be
just the tool that small businesses need to save themselves renumbering
efforts and keep some of the warm feeling as well.
That's locator/ID split -- too bad v6 wasn't designed for that...
--Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb