[85697] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: IPv6 news
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tony Li)
Sun Oct 16 02:26:49 2005
In-Reply-To: <C52CBAEE-4EA6-4927-A366-187B690CB338@virtualized.org>
Cc: Paul Vixie <vixie@vix.com>, nanog@merit.edu
From: Tony Li <tony.li@tony.li>
Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 23:26:20 -0700
To: David Conrad <drc@virtualized.org>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
>> but when similar things were proposed
>> at other meetings, somebody always said "no! we have to have end-
>> to-end,
>> and if we'd wanted nat-around-every-net we'd've stuck with IPv4."
>
> Is VJ compression considered a violation of the "end-to-end"
> principle?
>
> Or perhaps I misunderstand (yet again).
Paul is correct. Things that looked like NAT were rejected because
"NAT is evil". Shifting the NAT to end system removed the objection
to NAT, tho it's not entirely clear why. Shifting NAT to the end
system also happened to simplify the entire solution as well.
VJ compression should not be considered a violation of the "end-to-
end" principle, as it is a per-link hack and performs a function that
CANNOT be performed in the end systems. However, I'm not entirely
sure that this is relevant. NAT is not, strictly speaking, a
violation of the end-to-end principle. It certainly is rather ugly
and awkward from an architectural perspective, but it is a function
that is not otherwise required in the end host, so placing it into
the network does not violate the letter of the principle. Perhaps
this is yet another case where people misunderstand the principle
itself and are invoking it to give a name to their (well placed)
architectural distaste.
Tony
