[arin-ppml] Set aside round deux

[Chris Engel]

> Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> > Roger, I cut my teeth using debug to format and compsurf to
> brand ESDI
> > drives.  I deployed NAT in production when the ONLY way you
> could do it
> > was apply a massive patch to the FreeBSD 2.x kernel.  This was long
> > before Cisco released 11.2 IOS which was the first
> "commercial router"...............

This discussion again??

We could sit here and compare Tech "street cred." all day. I've been in Enterprise IT since 1990, get glowing marks on every performance review by the business owners and manage network operations and security for an ASP that has had ZERO successfull exploits of it's production servers in it's entire 10 year history of operation. Does that give me enough "street cred." not to be considered a newbie?

I rely on NAT as a usefull tool in my tool-box of solutions for specific business needs. I haven't seen anything in IPv6 that adequitely replaces that tool without having greater cost to me then NAT does. I insist on having NAT like solutions on the devices I deploy at MY network boundaries and will continue to do so in an IPv6 world....including defraying adoption of IPv6 until such solutions are available. Unless some-one is paying my salary, it's really not thier place to try to tell me to do otherwise. There are enough folks like me willing to put enough cash on the table for those solutions that sooner or later vendors will listen.

The bottom line is that not all experienced engineers have to agree that a specific method is the best way to achieve X (fill in whatever you like for X) nor do all experienced engineers even have to agree that X is desirable to be achieved in the first place. That doesn't make them bad engineers, it doesn't make them ignorant and it doesn't make them wrong... it makes them individuals. Anyone that can't accept that and afford people with differing technical viewpoints some measure of proffesional respect has deeper issues then just techical misunderstandings.

You can reiterate the same arguements until you are blue in the face. You simply aren't going to convince me and others like me that NAT isn't useful to me when years of personal experience using it tell me otherwise. Nor, unless you have some means to play internet Stalin and reach into my network, are you going to get me to stop using it.

Nor am I going to try to convince you that it is NOT problematic for you... I'm sure it has been.  Once I've presented my basic viewpoint on why it's proven useful to me, I'm done.  The internet should be a big enough, diverse enough and flexible enough place to accomodate both our viewpoints and our agendas. If it isn't then it fails in it's basic mission.

You have two options, you can either accept and accomodate my view as being a valid OPTION for the people who hold it... and try to accomdate that into the work/arguements you make that involve us all... or you can dismiss it. If you choose to dismiss it...I'll simply regard you as some-one unable to work with me....and whatever work or structure you do will loose relevance for me.

If anyone wonders why places like ARIN and IETF and the public lists they publish DON'T get more participation from folks like me, it's simple...

1) We are too busy runnning our oganizations daily functions to take much time away to participate.

2) Those organizations don't do a very good job in advertising their public participatory aspects.

3) Every time we do wander into them and attempt to offer a view that differs from that which seems to be accepted by the orthodoxy we get dismissed as ingorant, inexperienced or simply wrong....and our viewpoints aren't taken into account. So what becomes the point of participation?  The echo chamber only wants to hear from itself.

It's part of the same reasons (IMO) why IPv6 is having such slow adoption... If you give people a "My Way or the Highway" type choice...they are likely to choose the Highway most of the time.


On a positive note, there are some folks on this list that are very good at accepting that well meaning and knowledgeble proffesionals CAN disagree on some very basic concepts and still work with one another. I personally, really appreciate how folks like David Farmer can disagree with some of the views that I hold...but still respect that I may have valid reasons for holding them.


Christopher Engel