Reply to post: Re: Please refrain from NAT66

The internet just BROKE under its own weight – we explain how

dan1980

Re: Please refrain from NAT66

@AC

"It seems to me that the major problems with IPv4 have been known for a very long time, and yet even with all the publicity regarding address space we have still ended up the creek without a paddle. Surely as sys- and net-admins we ought to have been preparing for a shift to IPv6 infrastructure in our roll-outs of IPv4 solutions . . ."

The reason this problem is so thorny is because there is one big, glaring, problem with IPv4 and a few other issues that are considered by people to be useful, broken, kludgey, unworkable or beneficial depending on who you ask.

What has us at an impasse is that the proposed solution to the single universally-agreed upon problem (the address space) aims to fix not only that but to change all other, ancillary sticking points in IPv4.

Chief amongst these is NAT and it is the battleground.

Where we are is with one side saying they wont deploy IPv6 without NAT and the other saying that they won't fix the address-space issue without also removing NAT.

People on the 'NAT must die' side of the divide argue that IP was never designed with NAT in mind and it is a 'kludge' that makes everything so much harder than it needs to be at the networking level. The counter-argument is that the internet has evolved and NAT is actually a very good solution to a problem that evidently wasn't forseen in the early days and its removal would make everything so much harder at the human level.

Yes, NAT poses some problems but most of these have been dealt with, such as with FTP and SIP and encryptions. When Trevor talks of dogma, he is (not to put words in his mouth) talking about the view that IP communication should be as it was originally designed to be - direct, end-to-end communication from node to node, with the sender using the IP address of the recipient node.

That certainly makes everything very neat but then so does leaving your front door open with the idea that you should be able to go straight from your office to your bedroom without having to go through all those other pesky doors.

In the end, the way IP was 'supposed' to work was good in theory and even worked for a while (much the same way leaving your doors unlocked at night likely worked in small villages) but it is just not practical for the current Internet. Those pushing IPv6 and the removal of NAT can be seen as holding up an ancient stone tablet and insisting that as it was written, so shall it be done, and they are doing so with at best no regard and, at worst, conscious disregard for the realities of network and internet connectivity 'on the ground' today.

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