Re: [BEHAVE] IPv6 Flow Label

[Sebastien Roy <Sebastien.Roy@Sun.COM>]

Hesham,

On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 22:58 +1000, Hesham Soliman wrote:
> => I think that a perfectly useful answer to the IESG is to say that since
> there is no _need_ for NATs in IPv6, we don't have to consider it.

This is intended merely as a data-point, and not to fuel any NAT-related
fires:

I'm aware of IPv4 deployments using NAT in order to easily implement
transparent proxies.  Specifically, they use a NAT to transparently
redirect packets to a local address and port, and a user-space proxy
receives those packets, processes them, and retransmits them.  The use
of NAT here has nothing to do with preserving address space, but as a
hack to transparently redirect all packets to a local address and port
in order to have a local application receive them.

I'm also aware of deployments implementing this same hack for IPv6, so
to issue a blanket statement that there is no need for NATs with IPv6
may be ignoring some weird use cases like the one above.

That said, I don't know whether this particular use of NAT needs to be
considered here, I'm merely stating that there is IPv6 NAT out there
(much to my chagrin) that might need to be considered.

-Seb