I was invited to present my thoughts on NAT64 and DNS64 in the upcoming 3rd Slovenian IPv6 Summit (well, they still haven’t managed to create a bilingual site, so here's the same page from the perspective of Google Translate). While preparing for the presentation, I’ve greatly enjoyed reading the Framework for IPv4/IPv6 Translation IETF draft. I would highly recommend it; it’s rare to find such a concise and instructive document and it’s a mandatory reading if you want to understand the role of NAT in the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition.

The role of NAT64 in enterprise networks is described in the Enterprise IPv6 Deployment workshop.

Among other things, the draft analyses all eight potential NAT scenarios and makes the obvious (but very polite and well-reasoned) conclusion: NAT64 (IPv6 clients accessing IPv4 servers) is very important in the early rollout phases of IPv6 (more so when we run out of IPv4 addresses), while the generic NAT46 (IPv4 clients accessing IPv6 servers) makes no sense whatsoever. Yet again, it’s obvious that the developers of IPv6 protocol stack (NAT-PT in this case) were not too well aligned with pragmatic reality.