the alleged evils of NAT, was Rate of growth on IPv6 not fast enough?

Wed Apr 28 22:16:54 UTC 2010

--- On Wed, 4/28/10, Mark Smith <nanog at 85d5b20a518b8f6864949bd940457dc124746ddc.nosense.org> wrote:
> 
> I'm not people are understanding or know the true reality.
> NAT broke the
> Internet's architecture, by turning IP from being a
> peer-to-peer
> protocol into a master/slave one (think mainframes and dumb
> terminals).
> Read RFC1958 if you don't understand what that means,
> specifically the
> 'end-to-end' principle part. IPv6's fundamental goal is to
> restore
> end-to-end.

And this, in a few short sentences, is why IPv6 adoption has been so incredibly slow and frustrating.  For some of us, IPv6's primary benefit is solving the "32 bits aren't enough" problem.  For others, the commercial Internet architecture which evolved is aesthetically offensive, and they see IPv6 as the corrective mechanism.  

Only one of those two has any sort of time constraint (read: necessity), and it isn't the latter.  The end-to-end principle is grand, I agree - but there are lots of commercial considerations which I find have a higher priority for my customers.

David Barak
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