[Din] Dealing with NAT and other thoughts on what IPREF can do for DINRG

[waldemar <[e-mail]>]

I wanted to follow up on my comments regarding NAT. During Michał Król's 
presentation I mentioned that there is a technology that makes NAT a 
non-issue.

The technology is called IPREF (IP addressing with REFerences) and it is 
described in the following draft:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-augustyn-intarea-ipref/

IPREF is a method of traversing different address spaces, including 
NAT/NAT6/filters as well as cross protocol IPv4/IPv6.

With IPREF, servers behind NAT can be reached without problems. It is 
done 100% through the network layer (no port manipulation). IPREF can 
reach thousands of servers behind NAT with all ports available. There is 
no mapping to global addresses, either. That's especially important to 
IPv4 sites, where one can have billions of servers behind NAT without 
having to map any of them to any global addresses. This means, there 
could be 200,000 websites behind NAT, if one desires, and they all will 
be reachable at the usual port 443 without conflicts. IPREF can also 
traverse IPv4/IPv6, so one can have a mix of IPv4/IPv6 servers and they 
all will be reachable. There is no other technology that can do it.

IPREF supports peer-to-peer applications just as easily. This is 
relevant to ideas like Local-First Software, presented by Martin 
Kleppmann. Although not mentioned explicitly, the ideas in this 
presentation seemed to rely on peer-to-peer networking to avoid 
centralization. IPREF provides necessary means of direct communication 
between participants in Local-First applications.

IPREF itself is decentralized. There is no shared configuration, no 
control protocols. All configuration, behavior, allocation of references 
is vested with local admins. IPREF can be used with many projects aiming 
at decentralization of the Internet.

I am thinking, maybe I should make a presentation of IPREF to the group 
where I would point to some important design features that decentralized 
system could take advantage of.

Waldemar Augustyn