At 02:19 PM 12/14/00 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>I haven't decided which of the four NAT should be blamed on.
let's be fair. There was an excellent reason for NAT at the time. Postel
suggested that private address spaces could be used rather than assigning
precious IP Address space to networks that had no intention of attaching to
the network, and NATs wound up being a way to couple that with topological
address space management to try it out. We knew it was a short term hack at
the time, and many of us still think that.
As Yakov is prone to point out, in a perfect world wherein all applications
are client/server and address space is uniformly available, there are
enough addresses around so that NATs are all we need. There are a few problems:
- the world is not perfect
- all applications are not client/server
- address space is not uniformly available
Hence, NATs don't solve every problem.
The reference to IPv6 is interesting. Up until a year ago, I didn't
particular push IPv6 as a solution. Reason: it wasn't in anybody's
operational game plan. IPv6 had a serious chicken/egg problem - numerous
people wanted to be the second to deploy it, but nobody wanted to be first,
and vendors generally didn't see the point in implementing it apart from
somebody waving cash to buy it. As a proposal, it solved some interesting
things, like more bits in the address, better autoconfiguration, more
scalable mobility, more efficient VJ Header Compression, re-introduces the
end to end model so we can support non-client/server applications well, and
so on. However, being "good" isn't enough unless is it "good enough to
deploy" - good enough to replace the old stuff, or good. When 3G put the
proposal on the table, it became viable. At the moment, globally, we have
perhaps half a dozen to a dozen commercial networks running IPv6 and
upwards of 50 research networks. That's an insignificant dent in the great
wide Internet, but it is not "nothing" either. We have some pretty large
countries that have stated an intention to move in that direction. Now that
folks have the opportunity to be second - someone else has gone first -
anyone who is having trouble getting addresses from a registry is thinking
seriously about IPv6.
In short, things had to get worse before they could get better.
We'll see where things go, but whatever my opinions on IPv6 are (and I am
on record as saying it isn't all we might have liked it to be, my voice
being one among many), I am not at all convinced that it is a washout.
