Rate of growth on IPv6 not fast enough?

Tue Apr 20 18:59:29 UTC 2010

On 4/20/2010 10:29 AM, Roger Marquis wrote:
> Interesting how the artificial roadblocks to NAT66 are both delaying the
> transition to IPv6 and increasing the demand for NAT in both protocols.
> Nicely illustrates the risk when customer demand (for NAT) is ignored.

This is really tiresome. IPv4 NAT existed commercially long before there 
was any effort at standardizing it. If you have a commercial requirement 
for IPv6 NAT inform your vendors and help them build a business case. I 
worked at a firewall vendor for a couple of years, and in that time I 
worked on the business cases for both ipv6 NAT and NAT-PT ipv6 ipv4 nat 
protocol translation, NAT-PT even got so far as a prototype in that 
organization (IOS has NAT-PT btw). I can tell you want stalled me out on 
this in 2007-2009 was a lack of paying customers prroritizing the 
features not an inability to understand the problem space.

What's commercially available in the space is going to be a product of 
demand, not a product of documents produced by the IETF. if there is 
consensus among vendors about how such a thing in implemented that 
manifests itself ietf doucments so much the better.

> That said the underlying issue is still about choice. We (i.e., the
> IETF) should be giving consumers the _option_ of NAT in IPv6 so they
> aren't required to use it in IPv4.

You're going to use it in v4 anyway. choice in the marketplace is about 
what you're willing to pay for, vendors at leat the ones that I work 
with don't turn on a dime and the have a lot of functionality gaps to 
close with ipv6 not just this one.

> IMO,
> Roger Marquis
>