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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical And Now for Something Completely Different (was Re: IPv6 news)
Tony, On Oct 15, 2005, at 11:26 PM, Tony Li wrote: Paul is correct. Things that looked like NAT were rejected because "NAT is evil". Religion is so much fun. Shifting the NAT to end system removed the objection to NAT, tho it's not entirely clear why. Shifting NAT to the end system also happened to simplify the entire solution as well.Except for the part about having to rewrite all existing implementations to take full advantage of the technology. VJ compression should not be considered a violation of the "end-to- end" principle, as it is a per-link hack and performs a function that CANNOT be performed in the end systems. However, I'm not entirely sure that this is relevant.Well, if you NAT the destination identifier into a routing locator when a packet traverses the source edge/core boundary and NAT the locator back into the original destination identifier when you get to the core/destination edge boundary, it might be relevant. The advantages I see of such an approach would be: - no need to modify existing IPv6 stacks in any way - identifiers do not need to be assigned according to network topology (they could, in fact, be allocated according to national political boundaries, geographic boundaries, or randomly for that matter). They wouldn't even necessarily have to be IPv6 addresses just so long as they could be mapped and unmapped into the appropriate locators (e.g., they could even be, oh say, IPv4 addresses). - locators could change arbitrarily without affecting end-to-end sessions in any way - the core/destination edge NAT could have arbitrarily many locators associated with it - the source edge/core NAT could determine which of the locators associated with a destination it wanted to use Of course, the locator/identifier mapping is where things might get a bit complicated. What would be needed would be a globally distributed lookup technology that could take in an identifier and return one or more locators. It would have to be very fast since the mapping would be occurring for every packet, implying a need for caching and some mechanism to insure cache coherency, perhaps something as simple as a cache entry time to live if you make the assumption that the mappings either don't change very frequently and/ or stale mappings could be dealt with. You'd also probably want some way to verify that the mappings weren't mucked with by miscreants. This sounds strangely familiar... Obviously, some of the disadvantages of such an approach would be that it would require both ends to play and end users wouldn't be able to traceroute. I'm sure there are many other disadvantages as well. However, if an approach like this would be technically feasible (and I'm not entirely sure it would be), I suspect it would get deployed _much_ faster than an approach that requires every network stack to be modified. Again. Particularly given the number of folks who care about multi-homing are so small relative to the number of folks on the Internet. Can two evils make a good? :-) Rgds, -drc (speaking only for myself, of course)
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