Re: [BEHAVE] Comments on the NAT66 draft

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <[e-mail]>]

On 6 nov 2008, at 14:59, Wes Beebee (wbeebee) wrote:

> As we move to IPv6, NAT44, NAT64, and NAT46 will eventually go  
> away.  The problem with helping NAT66 (even when that is not your  
> intent) is that once it catches on, it'll be in the Internet forever  
> and will never go away.

> "NATs necessary for IPv6, says IETF chair"
> http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/072109-nat-housley-qna.html

> Once NAT66 gets out, I can imagine even more damaging headlines  
> (which conveniently miss all the subtleties of the message in  
> section 3 of http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-mrw-behave-nat66-00.txt) 
> : "IETF Standardizes IPv6-to-IPv6 NAT".

Well, if that's what we want to avoid, we shouldn't be coy and come  
out and say that IPv6 NAT won't be accommodated in IETF protocols.

What seems to be happening today is that we all look the other way and  
pretend the issue doesn't exist, because we either assume that of  
course there won't be any IPv6 NAT or of course there will. So we are  
on our way ending up with the same situation that we encountered with  
IPv4: suddenly, it's no longer realistically possible to deploy a  
protocol that isn't NAT-friendly, but there are so many different NATs  
that it's impossible to be friendly to them all, and many of them  
operate is very suboptimal ways that could have been avoided with some  
forethought.