Category: NAT

The last video in the 2-hour-long Network Addressing part of How Networks Really Work discusses Network Address Translation.

After watching it, you might want to spend some extra quality time (with a bit of soap opera vibe) enjoying the recent ‌Dual ISP deployment operational issues and uncertainties thread on the v6ops mailing list with a “surprising” result: NPTv6 or NAT66 is the least horrible way to do it.

I love reading well-argued contrarian views, and Geoff Huston’s Opinion in Defense of NAT is definitely worth the time it will take you to read it.

TL&DR: Geoff argues that with all the wastage going on in IPv6 land (most bizarre: let’s give a /48 to every residential subscriber) the number of bits available for IPv6 endpoint addressing gets close to what we can squeeze out of IPv4 NAT.

One of my users couldn’t get the inter-VRF NAT to work after watching the DMVPN webinars (no real surprise there, the VRF lite concept is covered in more details in the Enterprise MPLS/VPN webinar) so I decided to write a short document describing the details.

If you’re a host running on an IPv6-only network, you might want to detect the IPv6 prefix used for NAT64 (for example, to transform IPv4 literals a clueless idiot embedded into a URL into IPv6 addresses).

Apple has a wonderful developer-focused page describing NAT64 and DNS64, including the way they synthesize IPv6 addresses from IPv4 literals. You (RFC 6919) MUST read it.

Network Address Translation (NAT) is one of those stateful services that’s almost impossible to scale out, because you have to distribute the state of the service (NAT mappings) across all potential ingress and egress points.

Midokura implemented distributed stateful services architecture in their Midonet product, but faced severe scalability challenges, which they claim to have solved with more intelligent state distribution.

Ed Horley wrote another great post arguing you don’t need Unique Local Addresses in an IPv6 network … and I couldn’t figure out what the problem was until I got the underlying context: it seems many engineers try to transplant their IPv4 mentality into IPv6 world and see ULAs as a nice replacement for RFC1918 with NAT66 or NPT66 on the private network edge. No wonder Ed argues against that.

Ed Horley, an awesome IPv6 geek I had the privilege to meet at NFD6, wrote an interesting blog post arguing against IPv6 ULA usage (particularly when combined with NPT66). We would all love to get rid of NAT, however ...

IETF recently published RFC 6877 (464XLAT) describing a dual-translation mechanism that allows an IPv6 host (or CPE) in an IPv6-only access network to pretend it still has IPv4 connectivity. Why would one need a kludge ingenious solution like this? In a word: Skype.

For more details, watch the video explaining the need for 464XLAT and two typical use cases: Android handset and a CPE device (example: SOHO router with 3G uplink).

15 years after NAT was invented, I’m still getting questions along the lines of “is NAT a security feature?” Short answer: NO!

Longer answer: NAT has some side effects that resemble security mechanisms commonly used at the network edge. That does NOT make it a security feature, more so as there are so many variants of NAT.

Every time I write about IPv6 multihoming issues and the need for NPT66, I get a comment or two saying:

But I thought this is already part of IPv6 stack – can’t you have two or more IPv6 addresses on the same interface?

The commentators are right, you can have multiple IPv6 addresses on the same interface; the problem is: which one do you choose for outgoing sessions.

The source address selection rules are specified in RFC 3484 (Greg translated that RFC into an easy-to-consume format a while ago), but they are not very helpful as they cannot be influenced by the CPE router. Let’s look at the details.

My friend Tom Hollingsworth has written another NAT66-is-evil blog post. While I agree with him in principle, and most everyone agrees NAT as we know it from IPv4 world is plain stupid in IPv6 world (NAPT more so than NAT), we just might need NPT66 (Network Prefix Translation; RFC 6296) to support small-site multihoming ... and yet again, it seems that many leading IPv6 experts grudgingly agree with me.

With the latest software release (12.3.01) the ServerIron ADX, Brocade’s load balancer product, supports the real NAT64 (not 6-to-4 load balancing). Even more, it supports all of the features I would like to see in a NAT64 box plus a few more:

True NAT64 support, mapping the whole IPv4 address space into an IPv6 prefix that can be reached by IPv6 clients. One would truly hope the implementation is conformant with RFC 6146, but the RFC is not mentioned in the documentation and I had no means of checking the actual behavior. DNS64 is not included, but that’s not a major omission as BIND 9.8.0 supports it.

Every time I write about lack of commercial NAT64 products (yeah, I know Juniper had one for a long time and Brocade just rolled out ADX code), someone tells me that company X has field-proven NAT64 product ... only most of them are really 6-to-4 load balancers. Let’s see what the difference is.

I’m getting questions like this one all the time: “Where are we with NAT-PT? It was implemented in IOS quite a few years ago but it has never made it into ASA code.”

Bad news first: NAT-PT is dead. Repeat after me: NAT-PT is dead. Got it? OK.

More bad news: NAT-PT in Cisco IOS was seriously broken after they pulled fast switching code out of IOS. Whatever is left in Cisco IOS might be good enough for a proof-of-concept or early deployment trials, but not for a production-grade solution.

Summary: I can’t figure out how to make small-site multihoming (without BGP or PI address space) work reliably and decently fast (failover in seconds, not hours) with IPv6. I’m probably not alone.

Problem: There are cases where a small site needs (or wants) to have Internet connectivity from two ISPs without going through the hassle of getting a BGP AS number and provider-independent address space, and running BGP with both upstream ISPs.