Subject: Re: Why people by NATs

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 02:33:54 +0100

At 00:47 27/11/2004, JFC (Jefsey) Morfin wrote:
>At 17:08 26/11/2004, Jeroen Massar wrote:
>>
>>On Fri, 2004-11-26 at 10:11 +0100, Leif Johansson wrote:
>> > > For somebody administering a network of 100 machines, the hassle cost of
>> > > IP renumbering would be twenty times larger.  Given this, how could
>> > > anyone wonder why NAT is popular?
>> >
>> > Wrong. If you administer 100's or 1000s of machines you build or buy
>> > a system for doing address management. Renumbering is only difficult
>> > if your system is called vi :-)
>>
>>Wrong ;) Well at least, up to 1000 is probably doable.
>>But what if you are talking about 100s or 1000s of organizations with
>>each a 100 or 1000 machines.
>>
>>Organization/Management and actually finding out who is doing what in
>>such a big environment is the problem. (Of course the people who where
>>'managing' this network should have seen it coming sooner or later, but
>>they already left of course).

Whatever the tool you use it will only simplify the complexity, but the 
rule will stay the same: the chance of problems in a network change is 
proportional to the number of relations between the concerned nodes. Also 
decentralized changes are more easily managed but more support demanding. 
So the larger the network the more untrained people (from a lot of 
different departments and entities) are involved, problems will be in 
proportion to the power of this involvement. You can reduce that 
proportion, but the power will bit you.

But why to spend time and money and to take risks to change something which 
is not broken. IPv6 has no problem in keeping the same host numbers if the 
used addressing plan uses a numbering scheme designed with that purpose in 
mind, like the telephone numbering scheme. You change of telephone 
providers - or use several at the same time - without changing number. If 
you separate routing from designation (same Host ID, whatever the Network 
ID) you do not have to change and can be on different ISPs at the same 
time. There are 6 plans to permit at least one to do that; I understand the 
one the ITU plans to manage will permit this?
jfc

>>Greets,
>>  Jeroen
>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Ietf mailing list
>>[email-masked]
>>https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2004 21:53:02 -0500

On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 02:33:54 +0100, "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" said:

> providers - or use several at the same time - without changing number.

That's because the phone number is more akin to a DNS name than an IP address.

I'm pretty sure that if you investigate the insides of how the telco system
makes that transparent provider-change work, you'd not be as interested in
using it as an example.  (Or did you *want* to go back to the days when routing
tables were shipped around and installed on the fuzzballs twice a week?  I got
tired of *that* back in 1984.  And back then, the routing tables were only a
few hundred lines long, not the 150K routes we have now...)

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 13:07:25 +0100

>few hundred lines long, not the 150K routes we have now...)

Dear Valdis,
OK, I will document it more.

Back in 1978 when we introduced the structured naming on the public 
international packet switch network, we based it upon a routing technology 
separating addresses from routing. This is why *since its inception* I am 
tired by dumb table routing. As Harald puts it: IETF is to maintain IPv4, 
develop IPv6 and imagine mobile IP. I submit these are totally different 
problems than to analyze and build from an existing solution, and to 
analyze a need and design a new solution. So, please let use the past as a 
bank of experience, but let not talk of "going back" when referring to 
analyzes also used (and tested) in the past. We simply know them better.

Call establishment needs four informations:
- (a) where the caller calls from
- (b) how the caller identifies the callee in a directory of called addresses
- (c) how the callee designates himself in a directory of called addresses
- (d) routing information from caller to callee

 From Internet past usage (b) is named "name" and uses structured "0-Z" 
"numbers", (c) is named "IP address" and uses "0-255" "numbers" also 
expressed in 0-9 and (d) uses various information sources and systems (DNS, 
header of the address, routing tables). This results from an optimization 
and network principles based upon Louis Pouzin's catenet principles and 
Vint's generalization (EIN78) backing in 1974/1978. This is a cute 
compromise between the distributed nature of the needs and the 
centralization required by the computer capacity of the time, in a 
decentralized academic governance : it works well for 30 years. Other 
communications systems had, have and will have different compromises. For 
example, telephone has its own compromises you refer to.

This leads to a hierarchical vision described as "network of the networks". 
I submit that this time is over and that the current usage paradigm (hence 
the usage specification trend) is far more subtle. I would describe it as a 
"continuity of involvements".

As you say, these compromises were over a few lines. They supported well 
the growth because of the growth of the computer power and the decrease of 
the prices. This have hidden that the constraints which lead to these 
compromise exist no more, and that new - far more user oriented - 
constraints appeared which should lead to new compromises. This is all what 
I try to make accepted and introduced in the Internet standard process in 
being in here.

 From the current regulatory thinking evolution, I see that
- considering a telephone number as a sequentially distributed ID nationwide,
- and to attach in it service information (a service prefix) rather than 
routing information (area code)
are for the few years to come concepts they _want_ to publicly investigate.

IMHO, that approach addresses most of the addressing reasons NATs are used 
for, since host/subhost addresses are stable and quite unlimited.

But it is true that this could lead gigantic tables size and to an 
incredible processing if we wanted to have the QoS we initially had on the 
international public network before OSI. Or to keep and better the current 
telephone call establishment QoS.

I submit that this problem is far easy to solve than when it was 
investigated 30 years ago. Because of the experience of the last 30 years, 
and because of the network capacity/computer power of today (150 K is a big 
spam mail size. Every morning my AVG loads a 1.5 Meg update and rebuilds my 
tables). So, I am not concerned by the size to load and by the refresh. But 
I am concerned by the table size with the growth in the number of what 
could be "wild" IP addresses and the resulting CPU load on routers. This is 
why I submit that what we name an IP address, should be understood as an 
IPv6 header container for call management matrix as much as it is an "IPv4 
longer addresses" to transparently migrate from IPv4 to NGN.

This management matrix could for example contain:
- the numbering plan block (for example 010 or 011)
- the type of usage : unicast, anycast, multicast, admin (2 bits)
- the service : IP, Phone, S/MMS, TV, Radio, OSI, Postal, others (hopefully 
3 bits)
- the NetworkID (6 Bytes)
- the HostID (6 Bytes)
- the InterfaceID (3 bytes)
total : 16 bytes or /128

I submit that in having a National Digital ID provided to every citizen and 
incorporated entity and then upon additional request, and being usable the 
same as Network ID (with a fee to pay for routing management) or as a Host 
ID, most the problems belonging to the needs of the users side are 
addressed. As Harald says: the standardizers job is to deliver the protocol 
and the numbering space availability. A plan as I documented can be 
suggested/discussed by IAB/IETF, but is the job of the users (that is to 
say of the ITU or of a "Uninum" consortium) after consulting the IAB/IETF. 
It will then be afterward to the IAB/IETF to discuss the additional 
services which can be devised to better support it.

I submit that if this approach permits to make addressing and routing 
orthogonal as NAT only partly do (two ISPs call for 2 NATs and two host 
addresses) it also delivers more routing information than the current 
addresses, because of the national Host ID header. This might permit to 
reduce the ratio tablesize/number of addresse, to develop the grid of local 
exchanges city networks will ask for, and to delay the design of a 
distributed routing supervisory solution.

Let us understand that if their functions are similar (it could be imagined 
as supporting addresses as numeric names), a supervisor which would match 
Network or Host addresses with other addresses would not be a DNS, because 
they would not be at the same layer and used the same way.

I will end with this: the interbox experimental robust architecture we 
start working on is pure NGN (a "corebox" to interface the services over IP 
or any other datacoms solution and support OPES). It will be seen as a NAT 
or pure IPv6 depending on such an addressing plan availability. Time has 
come when we will sell for $ 100 what I sold for $ 100.000 in 1984 but on a 
20 billion addresses system instead of 20.000. I do not think anyone can 
delay that tide anymore.

jfc