Re: Last Call: draft-ietf-v6ops-natpt-to-historic (Reasons to Move NAT-PT to Historic Status) to Informational RFC

[Brian E Carpenter <brc@zurich.ibm.com>]

On 2007-02-28 17:02, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
> The core assumption here seems to be that NAT is a bad thing so lets get rid of NAT rather than trying to make NAT work.

This is startlingly irrelevant to the present document. We have a large corpus
of documents about the issues caused by NAT and about partial solutions. But
this document is about NAT-PT, which is something else.

> The questions that I would like to see answered that I don't see in the document are
>
> 1) What is the deployment strategy for IPv6 without NAT?

As Fred has pointed out, there is also a large corpus of documents
about this, and it's clearly out of scope for the present document.

> 2) Are people actually using or deploying NAT-PT?

Had you read the draft carefully, you would know that
  "From a deployment perspective, 3GPP
   networks are currently the only 'standardised' scenario where an
   IPv6-only host communicates with an IPv4-only host using NAT-PT as
   described in the 3GPP IPv6 transition analysis [RFC4215], but NAT-PT
   has seen some limited usage for other purposes."

> 3) Exactly why should an application be invited to care about this issue?

Others have responded on this, but to summarise: an application that
assumes addresses have end to end validity will fail. That much, NAT-PT
has in common with NAT.

    Brian