Re: [sunset4] draft-tsou-stateless-nat44

["George, Wes" <[e-mail]>]

Also, there are already
> multiple
> > competing stateless solutions. I'd rather not add another without a
> very good
> > statement of what problem it's solving that the existing ones do not.
> That's
> > actually the reason for question #2 - "existing technologies" also
> refers to
> > alternate solutions to the same problem that are still in draft, not
> just existing
> > running code.
>
> [Will] Our solution excels other stateless ones in the following fields.
> 1 Security. Our solution employs discontinuous addresses. Therefore
> attack with a fake ip address is not an easy work.
> 2 Increase the utilization rate of the port range. Users can be assigned
> by a proper-size port range by using the variable prefix pool.
> >
> > >
[WEG] Is there a reason that these improvements couldn't be incorporated into the other stateless solutions to optimize them (vs being their own separate implementation)?
I ask partially out of ignorance - I honestly don't know based on the current draft and subsequent explanations if there is a technical reason why we need a separate implementation instead of optimizing the existing one(s). But I also ask to further illustrate my point about existing technologies and justification: IETF has far too many drafts out there that could be summarized as: "this is like solution X, but it does this one thing differently, so it's better" or "solution X solves every use case but this one, so we've come up with a different solution that solves for this one corner case" and "no, it's just different enough that we couldn't possibly consider integrating the ideas." Then the two (or 3, or 4, or 5! ) solutions compete for the same resources within the WG, and we end up with impasses like we have in Softwire [1, 2] or RRG [3], where neither group of authors is willing to compromise and the group can't seem to get to consensus to pick a "winner". The result is that we either have multiple competing solutions, or progress stalls, or likely both. Given that this solution exists in the same space as the example I cited, I'm justifiably concerned.
Speaking personally, I like the concept of this working without specific CPE support, but as a chair, I'm not satisfied with this justification so far.

References:
[1] http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/softwires/current/msg03734.html
[2] http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/softwires/current/msg04221.html
[3] RFC6115

Thanks,
Wes George

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