Subject: Re: Why IPv6 is a must?

From: "Rinka Singh" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 07:16:34 -0700

Please can you help me understand how it gets in the way.

As I understand these devices would:
- accept (authenticated) commands - perhaps snmp (there's some thought
of using sip proxy commands) format.
- send status/traps (snmp again).

Any NAT would be able to translate both ways - OK it would stumble if
there was end-to-end encryption but a small device may not have
encryption capability.  It should be easy to add NAT (one would need a
router, firewall, gateway/gatekeeper anyway).

If the issue is only that of encryption then I accept your point.  But
perhaps I'm missing something.  I'm looking for reasons why NAT/v4
cannot/will not address the needs of the new devices.

>>> Keith Moore <[email-masked]> 11/26/01 7:17:38 PM >>>
> 3) new devices that plug into residential networks (mostly new)
>
> What stops the new devices from having v4 with NAT to translate
between the
> internet and the house. 

nothing stops them, but if you want to access the devices from outside
the
house (and in many cases that's the point of such devices) then NAT
gets 
in the way.

Keith

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 13:06:42 -0300 (ART)

> router, firewall, gateway/gatekeeper anyway).

Not as easy as one may initially imagine. Think of complicated application 
level protocols as H.323 which carry ip information in packets. Adding 
support to NAT gateways would involve integrating gatekeeper/H.323 proxies 
to routers. End-to-end encription is other area where NAT would be very 
difficult to implement. There are many examples of "difficult to be 
accomplished with NAT tasks" (like P2P networks) that could be easily 
solved by expanding the amount of available addresses (like IPv6). Not 
talking about the specific capabilities IPv6 integrates (AH, for example).

I'm not saying that almost same things could be performed by clever NAT 
under IPv4, but let's use Occam's razor and follow the simplest way of 
implementing things...

Regards,

Flavio.

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 17:15:34 +0100

> cannot/will not address the needs of the new devices.

If you have a few hundred devices in your house that need to act as
peers (not clients) to devices outside, they need to be addressable.
[we could have a digression on my choice of word, but I think it's
beside the point.] If they are all hidden behind one IPv4 address,
then a sub-addressing system is needed, and I'm not sure what you
think it will be, unless you want to use a well-known port number
for each device. It will just be *easier* to use IPv6 as the
addressing scheme - initially via RFC 3056, I expect. It also
solves the e2e encryption problem, as you say.

   Brian