Re: renumbering

[Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>]

> Any application author who wants to make their
> work NAT-unfriendly can't be -- and shouldn't be -- stopped.  But as far as
> the core protocols go, I think we should do a better job avoiding moralism
> tham IPsec did.

well, let's be clear here.  the argument about NAT isn't a moral argument.  
it's about the flexibility of the network to support a variety of 
applications, reliability, network management, and user support issues.  if 
it looks like a moral argument to some people it's just because the deeper 
technical and economic issues are not immediately obvious to everyone.

it's hard to imagine that any authors "want" to make their work NAT-unfriendly.
however for some applications there are not good, or even feasible, 
alternatives within the current internet architecture, and it's very difficult 
to retro-fit the current architecture to provide such alternatives.
(see draft-moore-nat-tolerance-recommendations-00.txt)

just because NAT shifts some burdens from network operators to applications 
implementors, doesn't mean that it actually solves any problems - it just
moves the problems to a group of people who are fundamentally less able 
to solve them.

btw, I'm fully in agreement that people will use NATv6 or simply avoid v6
if we don't make renumbering fairly painless.  and we really need *some* WG 
to seriously tackle that problem.  perhaps this is the one?

Keith