On Tue, Jun 16, 2026 at 06:23:37PM -0700, Matthew Petach via NANOG wrote: [... lots of "NATv4 is simple, IPv6 is complex" elided...]
> For small networks, IPv6 fails to provide any significant benefit beyond > what people are already experiencing in IPv4 networks behind NAT devices, > and we're collectively trying to gaslight each other and the rest of the > world into thinking it does. By "small networks" you really mean "any network where proxy access to the Internet is sufficient." There's a lot of those. Some of them are rather large. The devices behind the NAT aren't on the Internet -- the NAT is, and it proxies for them. NAT overload/IP masquerade/PAT all work with IPv6 too. So number your local LANs in ULA, and do that all you want. Modulo some address selection issues, this works quite well. So -- we have parity in IPv4/6 if we can just get an RFC out the door that defines how NAT should be done to avoid 20 years of creating middleware that takes care of corner cases. > I sincerely hope to be convinced otherwise. :/ I won't try to convince you of anything. I'll agree that you're right. We gave up trying to give every host a unique address -- proxies were sufficient for them to get to the services they really wanted. However -- we WILL run into a day in the future where the IPv4 address space isn't sufficient to number all of the required service/proxy endpoints. So we SHOULD be perfecting the alternatives. _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/WG4UM4BPMNHUSBQISDWZ6NRPFHCZRFPD/
