Re: [IPv6] Adoption call for draft-bctb-6man-rfc6296-bis

[Nick Buraglio <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2024 at 8:31 PM Lorenzo Colitti <lorenzo=
[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 26, 2024 at 6:33 PM Ole Troan <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> The benefit of NAT class mechanisms, is that cost and benefit are
>> aligned. Only one side needs to deploy it.
>>
>
> Actually, the benefit of NAT class mechanisms is that *one party deploys
> them and another party incurs the costs*. NAT is great for the network
> operator, because it moves a number of problems out of the network
> operator's domain. But it doesn't do that by solving the problem, it does
> so by making the application's job more difficult.
>

I don't think that is typically true. I will definitely say from experience
that there is a significant operational cost to deploying any translation
tool, and more so when there is active state tracking and overload
involved. There are often (but not always) logging requirements to do these
things at scale, and there are definitely operational costs in dealing with
state table tracking and scaling. These don't exist at the same level for
mechanisms that do not track state and that do not masquerade using port
address translation. They may still incur application cost, or they may
not, that is always going to be based on the application stack and is more
likely in real time applications that don't use a third party intermediary,
as you have stated.
There are similarities in the translation toolkits, yes, they all perform
translation at some level. However, what is generally referred to as "NAT"
in the general term is typically PAT or NAPT or Masquerading, depending on
the nomenclature. That said, *because* it is significantly easier to deploy
NAPT, I do not believe that it is an apples to apples comparison. They're
all tools in the "translation" category, but they're definitely not all
created equally. NPTv6 does a 1:1 translation, the NAT that folks seem to
be referencing in the IPv4 world does not, and I do not believe it is a
reasonable comparison.  It's a far better comparison to say that NPTv6 is
like a traditional one-to-one NAT (which does still have notable, albeit
significantly fewer considerations, which I believe are noted in the
draft).


nb

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