Subject: Re: recommendation against publication of draft-cerpa-necp-02.txt

From: Pyda Srisuresh <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Apr 2000 12:39:47 -0700 (PDT)

--- Keith Moore <[email-masked]> wrote:
<... stuff deleted>
> > As we have done with the NAT WG, it is
> > often useful to accurately document the drawbacks of a
> > common practice as well as to encourage exploration of
> > alternatives.
> 
> From my point of view there were significant forces within the 
> NAT group attempting to keep the extent of these drawbacks from 
> being accurately documented and to mislead the readers of those
> documents into thinking that NATs worked better than they do -
> for instance, the repeated assertions that NATs are "transparent".

Keith - I argued to keep the term "transparent routing" in the 
NAT terminology RFC (RFC 2663). The arguments I put forth were
solely mine and not influenced by my employer or anyone else. 
I donot know who else you are refering to as the "significant 
forces in NAT group attempting to mislead readers into 
thinkining NATs are transparent".
  
Clearly, your point of view is skewed against NATs. It is rather 
hypocritical and unfair to say that those opposed to your view 
point are misleading the readers, while you apparently do not 
purport to mislead.

> So I'm not sure that this is a good model on which to base future work.
> 
NAT WG has made substantial progress in the form of demystifying 
the FUD surrounding NATs. We still have work to do and intend to stay 
focussed to continue presening a balanced view point.

regards,
suresh

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---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 08 Apr 2000 16:43:00 -0400

> solely mine and not influenced by my employer or anyone else. 

didn't say that they were.

> point are misleading the readers, while you apparently do not 

I've tried to get an accurate assessment of the harm done by NATs.
Not surprisingly, NAT developers have tried to downplay these problems.

the problem with a "NAT working group" is that it attracts NAT
developers far more than it does the people whose interests
are harmed by NATs - which is to say, Internet users in general.
so by its very nature a "focused" NAT working group will produce
misleading results.

Keith

---

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Apr 2000 22:32:16 +0100 (BST)

> so by its very nature a "focused" NAT working group will produce

This bias holds for any working group, be it IPSEC, header
compression, or anything else. Why pick on NAT?

L.

<[email-masked]>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 08 Apr 2000 18:10:18 -0400

> compression, or anything else. Why pick on NAT?

good question.

Most IETF working groups are working on things that are 
more-or-less harmless, in that their effects are likely
to be isolated to those who choose to use them.  Their greatest 
potential for harm is that they will displace something better 
that might crop up in the same space.   The fact that such a WG
is biased toward its own problem space isn't of much consequence 
because their solution isn't likely to affect people trying to
solve different problems.

NATs (and interception proxies) have much higher risk - they attempt
to address certain real problems but they do so at the expense of 
flexibility, generality, predictability, and reliability of the
network.  They also violate long-established conventions about
the separation of functions between network layers, and in doing so,
break higher level applications that (quite reasonably) assume
that the lower layers of the network are working within their
design constraints.  

Within the current IP architecture, the notion of a "technically
sound NAT" is an oxymoron - NATs inhernetly violate fundamental
design constraints of the architecture.  The technically sound 
way to solve the problems that NATs attempt to address is not to 
alter the behavior of NATs but to provide alternatives outside
of the NAT space.  But a group that's NAT-centric is inherently
focused inside that space, and thus has a very limited ability to
promote technical soundness.

(and there are those who think that the Internet architecture
should be changed to incorporate NATs and that all of those applications
which don't work in the presence of NATs should be deemed obsolete.
but the effect of such a change is so widespread that it is far beyond the 
ability of the NAT working group - or any single working group - to evaluate)

Keith