[arin-ppml] An article of interest to the community....

[Lee Dilkie]

On 8/30/2011 4:06 PM, Mike Burns wrote:
> Hi Lee,
>  
>  
> Old work and new work on this issue:
>  
> http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1710.html
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6346
> https://mice.cs.columbia.edu/getTechreport.php?techreportID=560
>  
> The market, left to its own devices, has selected NAT as the
> pseudo-protocol of choice to facilitate virtually transparent address
> sharing.

NAT is not address sharing, it's address hiding and it totally
interferes with hosts that wish to "share" addresses.

> I think there is work undone which would extend NAT to allow customers
> to have control over even multi-layer NAT and would define clear paths
> for multi-NAT traversal.
> I believe the IETF and the registries have thwarted development in
> these areas because they see, correctly, that IPv6 is a superior
> answer to problems of address shortage.

and I agree with them, overlapping addressed hosts trying to communicate
with each other is problematic.

>  
> The problem is that IPv6 has no customer demand driving transition,
> and has thus languished.

yes, the problem is that there is no customer visible issue. it's a
technical one.

>  
> I am not saying that I have a replacement successor protocol to
> deliver to you, but I look hungrily at the 8 bits of port number space
> in the header and wonder whether it is possible to effectively
> multiply our current space by 256, which to me would provide ample
> headroom and still leave 256 potential ports per address.

there is no port number in the ipv4 header (or ipv6 for that matter).
The tcp and udp protocols have a 16 bit port in their headers but that's
of no use to ip.

>  
> And this is in answer to the question posed by Mr. Vixie, which
> postulated a no-option endpoint at IPv6.
>  
> If I had a magic wand to wave, I would wave it and turn the Internet
> to IPv6 overnight, I wouldn't wave it to create a half-way protocol
> extension.
>  
> But we have no magic wands to wave and exhaustion of the lingua franca
> staring us in the face.
>  
> Regards,
>  
> Mike
>  
>  

I'm in this for the long haul. There is no need to invent short-sighted
hacks to the addressing problem, just accept that it's going to take a
lot of work to do the right thing and changeout the underlying plumbing
of ip networks. It's not impossible and we've done it before, just need
to accept that it's the right thing to do and get on with the job.

-lee


>  
>  
>  
>  
>
>     ----- Original Message -----
>     *From:* Lee Dilkie <mailto:Lee at Dilkie.com>
>     *To:* Mike Burns <mailto:mike at nationwideinc.com>
>     *Cc:* Paul Vixie <mailto:paul at redbarn.org> ; arin-ppml at arin.net
>     <mailto:arin-ppml at arin.net>
>     *Sent:* Tuesday, August 30, 2011 3:19 PM
>     *Subject:* Re: [arin-ppml] An article of interest to the community....
>
>
>     On 8/30/2011 12:01 PM, Mike Burns wrote:
>>     buy us enough time to come up with some kind of backward
>>     compatible successor protocol to IPv4? 
>
>     no such thing exists... you cannot magically increase the size of
>     addresses and be backwards compatible. Even NAT, which didn't
>     touch the size of an address, isn't backwards compatible and broke
>     plenty of protocols.
>
>     You want magic or divine intervention... it doesn't exist. Only
>     plain old hard work will get us to our mundane goals of moving to
>     ipv6. There's really nothing to be gained by wishing otherwise.
>
>     -lee
>
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