[arin-ppml] IPv4 Depletion as an ARIN policy concern

[Owen DeLong]

On Nov 2, 2009, at 3:41 PM, William Herrin wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 12:54 PM, Kevin Kargel <kkargel at polartel.com>  
> wrote:
>> NAT started out as a kludgy local workaround and will always pretty  
>> much be
>> a local workaround.
>
> NAT started out as an improvement on SOCKS that allowed most
> applications to work unmodified. Understand why folks wanted the
> latter and you'll understand why they want the former.
>
I don't buy this...

SI started out as  an improvement on SOCKS that allowed most
applications to work unmodified. I can understand why folks wanted
this, having run some SOCKS gateways and having worked with
the guys at NEC that originally developed SOCKS.

NAT was a kludge added to SI which allowed you to pack more
addresses behind fewer addresses (or one address) by, essentially
doing a statistical multiplexing of IP address+protocol+port number
into a single 49 bit field which was dynamically assigned by the
gateway.

NAT restored the need to do application-specific weirdness to many
applications which did not need such modifications for SI.

If you look at it from this perspective, considering all the dysfunction
created by overloading end system identifier semantics with network
locator semantics (an error which was, unfortunately, preserved in
IPv6), then, you can begin to see why further overloading is not
necessarily a good thing.

Owen