Subject: Re: About IETF communication skills

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2008 08:26:13 -0400 (EDT)

> From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>

    > The article in question
    ...
    > mostly written by Carolyn Duffy Marsan.

It's probably also worth mentioning that she's been on this same beat for at
least 15 years or so, and so she's lived through a lot of the history, so
while she's not a technologist herself, she's not just any old media airhead
who just parachuted in. In my experiences with her, she seemed a dedicated
and careful reporter, who tried hard to do a good job of reporting accurately.

Having read it, I think this story is pretty accurate - and that's probably
why some people here are upset about it. The Emperor's New Protocol, indeed..

	Noel
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---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:16:51 -0400

Noel Chiappa wrote:

> why some people here are upset about it.

It's not the accurate parts I'm upset about.  From the article:

 > The Internet engineering community working on IPv6 is considering
 > reintroducing NAT - one of the very features that the upgrade to IP
 > was meant to eliminate.

"Reintroducing" is very misleading here, because it implies that the use 
of network address translation to allow a v4 host to communicate with v6 
host has more than a superficial similarity with the use of NAT in IPv4 
as a stopgap measure to deal with address scarcity.

 > Internet purists hate NAT because it breaks the end-to-end nature of
 > the Internet.

That should say "Internet pragmatists hate IPv4 NAT because it prevents 
many kinds of applications from working without adding considerable 
complexity and cost in the form of additional code and infrastructure, 
and because the introduction of IPv4 NAT and the additional complexity 
required to deal with it impairs performance and decreases reliability."

But these limitations don't inherently apply to NAT between v4 and v6, 
particularly not when the v4 address is a public one.

Keith

p.s. there's a whole other discussion to be had about how the IPv6 
feature set was chosen - e.g. why concerns like WAN routing scalability 
trumped other very valid concerns like incremental deployability, and 
how those choices affected the market's acceptance of IPv6.  IMHO we're 
still not very good at balancing long-term concerns vs. short-term ones 
in IETF.
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