>From: Owen DeLong o...@delong.com

>Sigh... NAT is a horrible hack that served us all too well in address 
>conservation. Beyond that, it is merely a source of pain.

I understand why you say that - NAT did yeoman's work in address conservation.  
However, it also enabled (yes, really) lots of topologies and approaches which 
are *not* designed upon the end-to-end model.  Some of these approaches have 
found their way into business proceses.  

An argument you and others have made many times boils down to "but if we never 
had NAT, think how much better it would be!"  

To this, the response "so what?" is not unreasonable - organizations which have 
built up processes and products around the non-end-to-end model may or may not 
see a benefit in changing their ways.  Asserting that there is something wrong 
with existing, succesful business practices is not, by itself, compelling.  

While you and I may find this type of packet header manipulation distasteful, 
there's lots of organizations for which it's normal operations.  The more NAT 
for v6 gets fought, the more folks will fight to preserve it.  Time could be 
better spent demonstrating why NAT isn't needed in X or Y use case, and 
providing configuration snippets / assistance for non-NAT-based solutions to 
those various groups.

David Barak
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise: 
http://www.listentothefranchise.com

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