Maybe an issue for the IPv6 and NAT Workgroups.
NAT was proposed as a temporary solution for the shortage of IP address,
which is solved with the IPv6 protocol. Currently I don't expect IPv6 to be
deployed soon (within 1 or 2 years). My ISP, nor many ISPs, aren't promoting
IPv6 yet, nor Microsoft provides IPv6 support for it's OSes.
But as finally IPv6 has been deployed world-wide, what will we do with NAT?
A disadvantage of NAT is that some protocols don't work good/correctly
through NAT. Here NAT broke the principle of the Internet, where every node
should be able to have bidirectional and end-to-end communication. FTP and
many games require this to operate correctly.
However, some scenarios where NAT provides THE solution, are for
* private networks that may not be exposed to the Internet and
* for networks that have only one IP address available to use on the
Internet,
while host on the private network are required to make 'direct' connections
to the Internet.
I don't think NAT should be made obsolete or unneeded after IPv6 has been
deployed, but rather to be offered for some purposes on small and home
networks. Most companies and bussinesses (even small ones) will be able to
afford a dedicated Internet Connection with a couple IP addresses,
esspecially after IPv6 has been deployed.
However I don't expect my ISP to provide me more than one IP address,
because I don't have a dedicated connection (yet) and I even haven't got one
static IP address (just DHCP). Also I want to separate 'MY' network from the
Internet, and don't install more network adapters into computers and lay
networking cable than needed. This requirement without having to make
strange configurations to any other computers on the network.
That's what's so good about NAT, from my point of view....
- Joris
--------------------------------------------------------------------
IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List
IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng
FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng
Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
