4 ms·

It would be a better use of everybody's energy to actually get to work on the IPv6 transition, rather than trying to squeeze another couple of years out of IPv4

It would be a better use of everybody's energy to actually get to work on the IPv6 transition, rather than trying to squeeze another couple of years out of IPv4. I think it should be pretty much obvious to everyone by now that until we actually hit the wall of IPv4, no one is going to get serious about the transition. NAT is not a great solution - it's a hack, and as anybody that has had to set up a server behind a NAT knows, it can be a real pain.

tptacek 16y ago
I'll wager that most residential Internet users are NAT'd, as are most corporate Internet users. The Internet works better today than it did back in 1996, when virtually nobody was NAT'd (back then, the big imposition was dynamic addresses instead of static).
- dasil003 16y ago
  NAT'd by their own router you mean? Because that seems like a world of difference from ISP-level NAT which I can imagine breaking a lot of shit.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    When people argue that IPv6 is necessary because NAT is a terrible hack that breaks applications, they are talking about the concept of NAT, the thing that makes it hard to pass a callback address in protocols they design and that requires their routers to peek into their FTP traffic. I'm sure ISP NAT is at some level worse than home NAT, but the point is, we can scale our IPv4 address space if companies stop, for instance, spending /19's to give every one of their desktops a routable IP address (which are then firewalled off the Internet anyways). We'll simply have to accept some form of self-managed NAT to do that. I'm fine with that. We're freighting IP with too much responsibility and it's holding us back. We'd have multicast in several different service models by now if people would just stop trying to get Cisco IOS routers to do it for us.

4 ms·

It would be a better use of everybody's energy to actually get to work on the IPv6 transition, rather than trying to squeeze another couple of years out of IPv4

by demallien 16y ago

tptacek 16y ago
I'll wager that most residential Internet users are NAT'd, as are most corporate Internet users. The Internet works better today than it did back in 1996, when virtually nobody was NAT'd (back then, the big imposition was dynamic addresses instead of static).
- dasil003 16y ago
  NAT'd by their own router you mean? Because that seems like a world of difference from ISP-level NAT which I can imagine breaking a lot of shit.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    When people argue that IPv6 is necessary because NAT is a terrible hack that breaks applications, they are talking about the concept of NAT, the thing that makes it hard to pass a callback address in protocols they design and that requires their routers to peek into their FTP traffic. I'm sure ISP NAT is at some level worse than home NAT, but the point is, we can scale our IPv4 address space if companies stop, for instance, spending /19's to give every one of their desktops a routable IP address (which are then firewalled off the Internet anyways). We'll simply have to accept some form of self-managed NAT to do that. I'm fine with that. We're freighting IP with too much responsibility and it's holding us back. We'd have multicast in several different service models by now if people would just stop trying to get Cisco IOS routers to do it for us.