> From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> When you've been awakened in the middle of the night every night for a
> week, because the NAT rules to deal with the fact that you have several
> intercommunicating networks all of which think they're 10.0.0.0/8
> ... Anyone out there who thinks NAT works well and is harmless is not
> familiar
Perry, I'm curious about the technical aspects of the problems you're seeing,
in particular:
Are the problems you are seeing due to i) the need for NAT boxes to grope
around in packets, ii) the fact that hosts don't have permanent, globally
visible internetwork-level 'names', or iii) something else (e.g. complex
configuration management)?
The reason I ask is twofold.
First, there is an alternative technology being proposed for local addresses
in IPv4, RSIP, which should avoid i), but still leaves us with ii) and iii).
So, to the extent the problems you are seeing are ii) and iii) we're still
kind of stuck, even if RSIP happens. To the extent that the problem is really
i), though, RSIP might alleviate the situation.
Second, when examining the transition technologies for deployment of the
proposed new internetwork layer, I've been pondering the problem of an
non-upgraded host trying to talk to an upgraded host with an address which is
only expressible in the new internetwork layer. The proposed transition
technologies I've examined (i.e. NAT-PT, AIIH, and SIIT) *all* seem to have
(at least as far as the IPv4 world is concerned) characteristic ii) - in that
as far as non-upgraded hosts are concerned, upgraded hosts using those
schemes don't have a permanent 'name' at the internetwork layer.
So I'd really be curious to know a little more about the "forest-level"
nature of the problems you're seeing out there - I think it will be very
insightful in considering a number of potential forward directions.
Noel
