Subject: Re: NATs *ARE* evil!

From: [email-masked] (Sean Doran)
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2000 03:24:27 +0100 (CET)

Perry Metzger writes:

| Maybe because I hear from folks like you and others that you're
| ideologically opposed to deploying v6 instead of against it for
| technical reasons?

You have never heard this from me.

I have no doubt whatsoever that you have heard this from others
speaking about me.  This probably includes your own inner voices.

Of course, that's because they do not have the technical acumen or
architectural insight to play the ball instead of the man, as they
say in soccer countries.

IPv6 is architecturally flawed in precisely the same way as IPv4
is; it simply has 4x the number of binary digits in the address fields
and some minor cleanups which were important some years ago.   That
you do not understand that IPv6 does not distinguish between who
and where, and that this ultimately will explode in the routing system in
exactly the same way that IPv4 is starting to, reflects upon you, rather
than whatever people think my ideology might be.

	Sean.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2000 23:06:11 -0500

the fact that IPv* doesn't distinguish between who and where does 
cause some problems, but does not significantly impact the ability 
to route IPv* packets.  even if you free IP addresses from any kind
of role as host identity (which IMHO would be a good thing except that
nobody has produced a satisfactory solution to the problem of mapping 
between the two), IP addresses will still need to be fairly stable,
and  there will still be a nontrivial amount of effort associated
with renumbering as the network topology changes.

Keith

---

From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>
Date: 17 Dec 2000 04:26:46 -0500

> speaking about me.  This probably includes your own inner voices.

Dunno. Some people at carriers are experimenting with it, some of them
seem to spend all their time being sarcastic and finding silly things
to say. Luckily, we no longer need your help.

> and some minor cleanups which were important some years ago.

Sure. On the other hand, it has four times more bits in the address
field, and at the moment, we desperately need those bits. It is
costing us truly astronomical sums not to have those bits.

It does not solve the routing problem. It doesn't solve world hunger
either. And your point is?

(On the routing problem, the sad truth is that in spite of claims for
years by you and others, there are no magic solutions to the routing
problem. Blaming IPv6 for not incorporating the non-existent magic
solution is rather like blaming IPv6 for not incorporating the
non-existent magic cancer cure. I used to believe you and others who
made vague claims about various architectures, and then I spent some
time reading up on them, and I realized that none of them did
particularly better.)

.pm

--
Perry E. Metzger		[email-masked]
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