On Nov 19, 2013, at 8:36 AM, Andrew Sullivan <asullivan@dyn.com> wrote:
On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 03:06:52PM -0500, Justin M. Streiner wrote:
Other IPv6 transition mechanisms appear to be no less thorny than NAT64 for a variety of reasons.
Some of us who worked on the NAT64/DNS64 combination were content that it was a long way from the perfect solution. The idea I at least had was to get something that mostly worked most of the time, and was simple enough that anyone could basically understand it. Nevertheless, I have to admit that it's a pig.
That piggishness was not something I wanted to get rid of. I thought (and still think) that if the transition mechanisms are awful enough, it will encourage moving things to v6 for real so that we can get rid of the kludges. Perhaps this is wishful thinking, however.
In any case, I'm sorry to have contributed in some little way to this headache of yours.
Speaking as one of the co-authors of RFC 6052, 6144, and 6145... I'm actually not sorry. The predecessor to RFCs 6052/6144/6145/6146/6147 was NAT-PT, which didn't work very well in part due to a nasty coupling (see RFC 4966). It's pretty straightforward to insert an IPv4 address into a specified IPv6 prefix (RFC 6052), and use that to statelessly translate between a IPv4 address and an RFC 6052 address (RFC 6145), or to statefully translate a random IPv6 address into an IPv4 space much in the way IPv4/IPv4 translation works (RFC 6146). What is hard is statefully translating from IPv4 to a generic IPv6 address - its hard to compress 128 bits of information into 32 bits. NAT-PT does it by having the DNS lookup temporarily assign an IPv4 address to the IPv6 device and inform the translator of the translation. http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-anderson-siit-dc (which Tore didn't, to my knowledge, try to get turned into an RFC, although I'd be willing to discuss that with v6ops) does it by pre-assigning address pairs, enabling an IPv6-only domain to be accessed from an IPv4-only domain by a defined translation between the two for a small set of servers. I'm all for helping people to transition. Where I get a little crazy is when the so-called transition tool makes them comfortable enough that they think they don't need to. What I expect to see in the IETF over the coming few years - and which I see in detail coming from several <nationality> competitors and their <nationality> network customers now - is a series of ideas of the form "but people with ancient IPv4-only hosts are having trouble with the IPv6 network; let's do this *temporary* patch to ease their pain". I submit that the best way to ease their pain is to upgrade their hosts. They will have to deal with it at some point.