On Nov 19, 2013, at 8:36 AM, Andrew Sullivan <asulli...@dyn.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 03:06:52PM -0500, Justin M. Streiner wrote: >> Other IPv6 transition mechanisms appear to be no less thorny than >> NAT64 for a variety of reasons. > > Some of us who worked on the NAT64/DNS64 combination were content that > it was a long way from the perfect solution. The idea I at least had > was to get something that mostly worked most of the time, and was > simple enough that anyone could basically understand it. > Nevertheless, I have to admit that it's a pig. > > That piggishness was not something I wanted to get rid of. I thought > (and still think) that if the transition mechanisms are awful enough, > it will encourage moving things to v6 for real so that we can get rid > of the kludges. Perhaps this is wishful thinking, however. > > In any case, I'm sorry to have contributed in some little way to this > headache of yours. Speaking as one of the co-authors of RFC 6052, 6144, and 6145... I'm actually not sorry. The predecessor to RFCs 6052/6144/6145/6146/6147 was NAT-PT, which didn't work very well in part due to a nasty coupling (see RFC 4966). It's pretty straightforward to insert an IPv4 address into a specified IPv6 prefix (RFC 6052), and use that to statelessly translate between a IPv4 address and an RFC 6052 address (RFC 6145), or to statefully translate a random IPv6 address into an IPv4 space much in the way IPv4/IPv4 translation works (RFC 6146). What is hard is statefully translating from IPv4 to a generic IPv6 address - its hard to compress 128 bits of information into 32 bits. NAT-PT does it by having the DNS lookup temporarily assign an IPv4 address to the IPv6 device and inform the translator of the translation. http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-anderson-siit-dc (which Tore didn't, to my knowledge, try to get turned into an RFC, although I'd be willing to discuss that with v6ops) does it by pre-assigning address pairs, enabling an IPv6-only domain to be accessed from an IPv4-only domain by a defined translation between the two for a small set of servers. I'm all for helping people to transition. Where I get a little crazy is when the so-called transition tool makes them comfortable enough that they think they don't need to. What I expect to see in the IETF over the coming few years - and which I see in detail coming from several <nationality> competitors and their <nationality> network customers now - is a series of ideas of the form "but people with ancient IPv4-only hosts are having trouble with the IPv6 network; let's do this *temporary* patch to ease their pain". I submit that the best way to ease their pain is to upgrade their hosts. They will have to deal with it at some point.
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