quietly....

Wed Feb 2 03:51:22 UTC 2011

On 2/1/2011 9:33 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
> On Feb 1, 2011, at 6:24 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
>
>> Once upon a time, Owen DeLong<owen at delong.com>  said:
>>> On Feb 1, 2011, at 3:41 PM, Karl Auer wrote:
>>>> 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.
>> That is an opinion (and not a unversally held opinion), not a fact.  I
>> tend to agree with you, but you keep stating your opinion as fact.
>> Telling people "I'm right, you're wrong" over and over again leads to
>> them going away and ignoring IPv6.
>>
> Using this definition of bug from Wikipedia:
>
> A software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program or system that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways.
>
> I argue that breaking the end-to-end model which is a documented fundamental tenant of the internet protocol and the internet addressing system is, by definition, within the definition above.
>
> Q.E.D. it is, in fact, a bug, not merely my opinion. Others are welcome to
> consider said bug to be a feature, but, it is, by definition, factually, a bug.

I apologize in advance for the strong wording, and will apologize for it 
in person (with a beer) at some point.  But:

A NATed client connects to a server, and they speak end to end.  A NATed 
server receives connections directly from clients.  It is more or less 
end to end, communications-wise, and so it is the same or less of a 
"bug," by your definition, than a proxy server, or a web cache, or ipv4 
anycast DNS, or inspecting/fixup capable firewalls.  And those are all 
things people want.  If you are advocating that IPv6 should not be 
capable of performing tasks people want it to perform, then you are 
advocating for IPv6 to follow the path of the OSI protocols as a "could 
have been the new Internet" protocol, and you are pushing the world 
toward the NATernet, and you are actually, unintentionally, one of 
IPv6's worst enemies.

Look back across all the big arguments over the years that had people 
turning purple and calling each other names and declaring that IPv6 was 
broken.  They are all about features in IPv6 that operators did not 
want, because directly or indirectly, they either disabled features 
people use now, or they told people how hey had to build their 
networks.  They were features dreamed up by academics, theoreticians, 
and purists, and opposed by operators.  You can blame sloth, ignorance, 
and heads in the sand all you want for the long wait for IPv6 adoption, 
but the insistence by IPv6 evangelists that IPv4-think is necessarily 
evil and that they are going to force everybody to conform to their 
perfect paradigm is also a big factor.  And this isn't just a perception 
issue, or rebellion at being told what to do.  Part of what made IPv4 so 
successful was that its simplicity made it inherently flexible, and even 
operators who are wrong about what things like NAT give them are right 
to rebel against restricting flexibility to meet certain people's 
perception of what network purity means today.

-Dave