Subject: Re: myth of the great transition (was US Defense Department forma lly adopts IPv6)

From: "J. Noel Chiappa" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 09:44:26 -0400

> From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>

    >>> the reason I point out the flaws with NAT is .. because some people
    >>> are still of the belief that NATs are mostly harmless and that we
    >>> should not only permit them into v6, but extend our architecture to
    >>> embrace them.

    >> Keith, that's not the only reason, and you know it. You want to point
    >> out to people how screwed up NAT's are in the hope that they will be
    >> more inclined to move *from* IPv4+NAT *to* your perfect future, one in
    >> which we once again have a global namespace.

    > when you try to guess what my motivations are, you are likely to be
    > wrong enough that you'll misrepresent them. 

OK, so I'm wrong - and you have nothing to say against NAT if we are only
proposing to use IPv4+NAT, and have no intention of adding NAT to IPv6?

	Noel

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 10:12:49 -0400

> proposing to use IPv4+NAT, and have no intention of adding NAT to IPv6?

I'm certainly not going to pretend that NAT doesn't have problems - and when
people argue that NAT is mostly harmless, I'm likely to try to counter that
idea because IMHO it's dangerous misinformation.  But I recognize that NAT is
here to stay in IPv4, that people will continue to use IPv4+NAT for the apps
that it works for, and that for some users, this is currently 100% of their
apps.  For now those users have little incentive to support IPv6, though I
think those users might be encouraged to adopt IPv6 in addition to IPv4+NAT as
IPv6 enables new apps that can't run on IPv4+NAT.  Which is why I've done some
work to try to make the barrier to adopting IPv6 on an existing IPv4 network
as low as possible.

I think we might get rid of IPv4+NAT eventually, simply because sites will
find it easier to maintain one set of addresses, filters, etc., rather than
two.   But I see this as a long way away.

my main goals are:

- combat the idea that NAT as a concept makes good sense from an architectural
  point of view
- keep IPv6 safe for distributed and/or p2p apps.