Forget IPv6 NAT; use LISP instead

Posted Jul 26, 2011 16:53 UTC (Tue) by baldur (guest, #77305)
In reply to: Forget IPv6 NAT; use LISP instead by Cyberax
Parent article: IPv6 NAT

You can be the first person in the world to implement LISP and it will be useful. It is not just a tunnel equallent.

Say you have ISP A and ISP B as uplinks. In addition pay for, rent or collocate a server at both ISPs where you install the LISP proxy software. Granted this extra expense but you got:

1) The ISPs are taking care of BGP.
2) Automatic load balancing both up and downstream.
3) Automatic failover.
4) If you got PI address space you can easily switch ISPs.
5) If one server goes down your are still good although this depends on the ISP stopping advertising your PI space.

LISP currently as an enormous amount of steam so I feel quite confident that the beta network will eventually convert to production state. At that point it will be just as easy to setup as NAT66 but without any of the drawbacks. All you would need is to login to the web interface of your standard router and check the LISP option. Then tell it four pieces of information: Your allocated EID, the address of the map service, your username and password.

Of course NAT66 will happen but I don't see multihoming or renumbering-protection as good use cases. These will be better handled by LISP. I don't see most applications getting good NAT66 handling the same way they have NAT44 handling today.

We are probably not going to get any more learnings or consensus out of this thread. I just wanted to point there are in fact more options than BGP and NAT66.

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Forget IPv6 NAT; use LISP instead

Posted Jul 26, 2011 17:53 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Well, it's much easier just to register in ARIN/RIPE and get PI assignment. It'll cost about $3000, which is far cheaper than two colocated servers/routers with BGP and LISP support. And I'll get all those benefits and without need to setup LISP.

We've actually considered a similar variant (colocate a server and use it to terminate GRE tunnels).

So while there may be other ways (I'll concede that multiple IPv6 addresses might work for somebody), your choice is still is very much between spending $$$$ and having in many ways inferior solution.

As for LISP, it merits its own article on LWN. And right now it's FAR from being really complete (which is OK, people are still working on it).