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Comment by wladimir | Hacker News Reader

No no no no no no no no.

NAT is not a solution. Internet is cool because it allows peer-to-peer communication. It's also cool because everyone can host servers and everyone else can connect to them. This allows exploration and experimentation.

Please don't force some people to become second-class citizens behind a NAT just because some artificial resource is running out. It's bad enough in the real world.

Also, "the addresses are just to long" is a nonsense argument, for many reasons. And HTTP is only one of the many protocols. But I think I've fed the troll enough.

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> But I think I've fed the troll enough.

I'm glad someone said it. This apenwarr seems to have some good karma here on HN, but IMO a lot of what he says is heavily misinformed and biased.

I had the urge to go point-by-point of his post and refute each with proper references and practical examples, but I then I realized that he is just a troll and that would be feeding him.

Some of his points, like about IPv6 addresses being too long and hard to memorize and that NAT is good/enough for users, basically points that he probably doesn't have much experience with network management and how IP works (specially IPv6 networks). This is strange coming from someone who was the original author of wvdial.

I have already argued here on HN why IPv6 addresses are easier to memorize: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1804038

So, Avery is just this guy, you know? It's not his fault if some of you want to fanboy on his every blog post.

I think he's right more often than he's wrong. (Although not in this article, which is nearly all wrong when it's not rehashing points that have been argued both ways for many years w/o a resolution.. hang out on NANOG for even a month and you'll see what I mean.) And I appreciate that he feels he has to get his half-baked thoughts posted now, before being swallowed by the Borg. Which will certainly change his opinion of some of this stuff if he ends up working with the ipv6 people @ Google.

The addresses aren't particularly human-memorable though. But yes, I agree on everything else. Another source for the pain of NAT is that it screws you if the server is limiting per-IP transactions. There's a supercheap ISP where I am that has a (cough) transparent proxy that isn't quite transparent - people on this ISP bitch constantly at being told by site X that "your IP address has reached it's allocation" when they've never visited that site before.

And what about whitehat countermeasures? Finding the source IP address is so much more useful than "it came from this giant ISP... somewhere". ISP-level NATting has nothing but disaster stamped all over it.

>The addresses aren't particularly human-memorable though.

IP addresses are? What is Facebook's IP? Googles? I have no idea because.... why on earth would I care?

I don't care about those two either. But when administrating my office computers internally and externally, I find it helpful. Likewise when I'm working on a device that is underpowered to the point where it has to use IP addresses because it can't handle DNS, I need IP addresses. When I want to use my friend's servers for network testing, I prefer to use IP addresses rather than names.

Names introduce an extra layer of complexity that makes troubleshooting more difficult at times. The world exists beyond facebook and google. You may not care about that, but I do.

I worked in Network Engineering for years. You will absorb the new unmemorable IP6 addresses the same way you absorbed the unmemorable IP4 ones.

Plus you potentially have the added benefit of having the MAC right there in the IP so you don't have to do any extra effort to figure out what it is.

In my experience, it is helpful to be able to remember IP addresses instead of just urls. Not a dealbreaker, but useful in some cases. Example - I set up a VPS server as a testbed/development server/socks proxy, but didn't bother to register a domain with it. It would suck to look it up the long IPv6 address the whenever I connect to it on a new device, or try to show it to someone else. The ten digit IPv4 address is fairly easy to memorize in comparison.

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