North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Access to the IPv4 net for IPv6-only systems, was: Re: WG Action: Conclusion of IP Version 6 (ipv6)

  • From: John Curran
  • Date: Mon Oct 01 14:50:26 2007

At 12:56 PM -0500 10/1/07, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
>...
>The fundamental flaw in the transition plan is that it assumes every host will dual-stack before the first v6-only node appears.  At this point, I think we can all agree it's obvious that isn't going to happen.
>
>NAT-PT gives hosts the _appearance_ of being dual-stacked at very little up-front cost.  It allows v6-only hosts to appear even if there still remain hosts that are v4-only, as long as one end or the other has a NAT-PT box. The chicken and egg problem is _solved_.  When v4-only users get sick of going through a NAT-PT because it breaks a few things, that will be their motivation to get real IPv6 connectivity and turn the NAT-PT box off -- or switch it around so they can be a v6-only site internally.
>
>The alternative is that everyone just deploys multi-layered v4 NAT boxes and v6 dies with a whimper.  Tell me, which is the lesser of the two evils?

Stephen -

  Very well said...

  Now the more interesting question is:  Given that we're going
  to see NAT-PT in a lot of service provider architectures to make
  deploying IPv6 viable, should it be considered a general enough
  transition mechanism to be Proposed Standard or just be a very
  widely deployed Historic protocol?

  Oh wait, wrong mailing list... ;-)

/John