Re: renumbering

[Brian E Carpenter <brian@hursley.ibm.com>]

below...

Keith Moore wrote:
> 
> > 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?

Perhaps, but the real point is that with AAAA records, the main need
is for tools not standards - specifically, tools to perform bulk updates
of a site's DNS table. Many sites and enterprises have such tools already
and adapting them to IPv6 is straightforward enough, but sites that
don't have such a tool (and therefore probably don't have an organized
host database or even an organized host naming strategy) will find
IPv6 renumbering almost as obnoxious as IPv4 renumbering. 

This matters. Paul is being pragmatic, but if the NAT fungus infects
IPv6 deployment we will have painted IPv6 into a corner.

So, still being pragmatic, how can we stimulate the creation of
renumbering tools (especially DNS bulk renumbering tools)?

   Brian