On Feb 1, 2011, at 3:41 PM, Karl Auer wrote:
On Tue, 2011-02-01 at 13:38 -0800, Owen DeLong wrote:
NAT solves exactly one problem. It provides a way to reduce address consumption to work around a shortage of addresses.
Devil's advocate hat on: NAT (in its most common form) also permits internal addressing to be independent of external addressing.
Which is a bug, not a feature.
The side effects of that are not necessarily desirable (loss of end-to-end connectivity, performance issues, limitations on simultaneous connections etc etc).
Exactly.
It seems to me that it is this property of NAT that people are most loath to lose. And why ULA looks tantalisingly delicious.
Yeah, but, if we take a step back and look for what they actually want that they are willing to give up everything else to get, it usually boils down to two things: 1. Obfuscation of host addresses 2. Ability to move an entire topology from one number space to another without reconfiguring the topology. IPv6 solves 1 with privacy addresses. These are horrible and I hope nobody really uses them, but, they're better than NAT. The solution to number 2 depends again on the circumstance. IPv6 offers a variety of tools for this problem, but, I have yet to see an environment where the other tools can't offer a better solution than NAT. Owen