At 1:50 PM +0200 10/2/07, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
ALGs are not the solution. They turn the internet into a telco-like network where you only get to deploy new applications when the powers that be permit you to.
At the point in time that NAT-PR is used for backward compatibility (because we're connecting new sites via IPv6) people should be encouraged to rollout their new apps over IPv6, right? What's the problem?
and tunnelling is still going to require NAT in the deployment mode once IPv4 addresses are readily available.
Yes, but it's the IPv4 NAT we all know and love (to hate). So this means all the ALGs you can think of already exist and we get to leave that problem behind when we turn off IPv4. Also, not unimportant: it allows IPv4-only applications to work trivially. Another advantage is that hosts with different needs can get different classes of tunneled IPv4 connectivity even though they happen to live on the same subnet, something that's hard to do with native IPv4.
That's a wonderful solution, and you should feel free to use it. It's particularly fun from a support perspective, because you get to be involved all the way down the host level. A lot of ISP's don't want to be involved in supporting *anything* all the way down to the local host level, and want a simple method for connecting new customers via IPv6 while offering some form of legacy connectivity to rest of of the (IPv4) Internet. You're asserting that they shouldn't be allowed to use NAT-PT for this purpose, despite the fact that it meets their needs? /John