North American Network Operators Group
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Re: IPv6 news

  • From: David Conrad
  • Date: Tue Oct 18 11:44:15 2005 
Michael,

On Oct 17, 2005, at 6:17 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Is VJ compression considered a violation of the "end-to-end" principle?
VJ compression happens in the middle of the network, between
two routers/gateways. End-to-end refers to the hosts, i.e.
the computers which "host" the end users' applications.
It was a rhetorical question. My point was that what happens between the ends is irrelevant if what gets sent from one end is what is received by the other end. Yes, it is obvious, however I have seen people freak out when you suggest touching the address fields, regardless of the fact that you say it'll be put back before it hits the destination end host.

Theoretically, in a network, a router/gateway could
have some intelligence/state so that it does not simply
forward packets based on destination addresses in the routing
table. Instead it does some kind of query/lookup to identify
the real destination location.
Yes.

All of this is simply hackery to get around a fundamental flaw in the Internet Protocol (either v4 or v6) - the lack of locator/identifier separation. My concerns with shim6 aren't that the protocol is broken, but rather it is so complex that I fear (a) it will take a very long time to implement, (b) it will take much, much longer to implement correctly, (c) it will never get fully deployed. Since I see multi-homing/renumbering/mobility (all facets of the same thing) as the underlying problem with IPv4, I'm hoping that by addressing that problem, IPv6 could actually justify its existence in a business sense. Since non-shim6 enabled stacks are already being deployed, I suspect an edge box approach will be the most pragmatic way of actually getting something people can use. Unfortunately, delays in deploying some sort of multi-homing/renumbering/mobility solution will, I suspect, entrench (single sided) NAT even more than it is entrenched today, even on IPv6 sites. So it goes.

Rgds,
-drc