Subject: RE: [MMUSIC] The fragementation of NAT traversal per application is unfortunate

From: "Henry Sinnreich" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 06:54:52 -0800

Rémi,

I agree with the sentiment in your comments and hope other folks on the list would provide their comments as well.

> what about having this balkanization of NAT traversal solutions for
> each application protocol separately?

> Maybe NAT traversal does not belong in MMUSIC as Lars Eggert has mentioned?

Thanks, Henry

-----Original Message-----
From: Rémi Denis-Courmont [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 2:16 AM
To: Henry Sinnreich
Cc: Magnus Westerlund; Cullen Jennings; Peterson, Jon; Gonzalo Camarillo; Jeff Goldberg (jgoldber); Philip Matthews; Lars Eggert; [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [MMUSIC] The fragementation of NAT traversal per application is unfortunate

Le Tuesday 26 February 2008 22:35:52 ext Henry Sinnreich, vous avez écrit :
> It is interesting to see doubting the support from Microsoft and that
> openVPN has the disadvantage of encryption :-)
>
> But what about having this balkanization of NAT traversal solutions for
> each application protocol separately?

I agree with you that re-inventing NAT traversal for "one's own" protocol 
seems to be a trend in IETF, not a very great one.

I would however point out that HIP is not *fundamentally* a NAT traversal 
mechanism, rather a new addressing architecture for the Internet, and OpenVPN 
is well, a VPN protocol, not a NAT traversal protocol. Because of this, their 
NAT traversal schemas simply cannot re-used.

That's why I like Teredo/RFC4380 and non-SIP ICE a lot better. These are 
*only* NAT traversal layers, and both of them are already widely deployed: 
RFC4380 is in all recent Windows boxes, and non-SIP ICE is basically the same 
as Jingle in GoogleTalk.

RFC4380 provides the "transport-agnostic" always-on tunneling schema which you 
keep asking for: you can run TCP unencumbered or any fancier transport on it. 
Non-SIP ICE is a simpler solution that can be used when you only need 
an "on-demand" "datagram" carrier through NATs.

Of course, you could also port OpenVPN on top of non-SIP ICE or so, but that 
only keeps the balkanization going.

> Maybe NAT traversal does not belong in MMUSIC as Lars Eggert has mentioned?

Quite possibly. It sounds very much like a transport issue, rather than a RAI 
(neither INT) one to me.

> I also tend to see it as transport issue that has to work transparently for
> all application layer protocols. HIP could do it, unless there are better
> solutions.

In my humble opinion, a better idea is to not reinvent NAT traversal specially 
for HIP, but use an existing schema instead.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
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