moving to IPv6

Mon Nov 3 03:50:27 UTC 1997

Sean M. Doran wrote:

> The thing that amazes me about people who are fans of IPv6
> is that they have realized that NAT is THE fundamental
> scaling technology for the Internet.

Well, there are two equivalent approaches to the scaling
problem: NAT or dynamic address allocation.  I'm not convinced
that NAT is better in long term; though i won't argue that
this is the most practical near-term solution.

The advantage of dynamic addressing is that it preserves the
clean separation between application and transport layers,
which is more kosher architectually, and allows to make a lot
of things much simpler.  The disadvantage is, it requires
serious rework of many things, while NAT can be just a "box"
in a middle.

> Routing issues are EXACTLY the
> same in IP and IPv6, the only difference is the width of
> the addresses, which worsens the poor scaling properties
> of IP with current routing protocols.

The claim that routing in IPv6 will be magically fixed is
exactly what prompted me to lose interest in IPv6 completely,
and tag the IPv6 crew as clowns.

--vadim