Tag Archives: NAT

An Opinion On Offense Against NAT

Posted on by
5

It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten to rant against Network Address Translation (NAT). At first, I had hoped that was because IPv6 transitions were happening and people were adopting it rapidly enough that NAT would eventually slide into the past of SAN and DOS. Alas, it appears that IPv6 adoption is getting better but still not great.

Geoff Huston, on the other hand, seems to think that NAT is a good thing. In a recent article, he took up the shield to defend NAT against those that believe it is an abomination. He rightfully pointed out that NAT has extended the life of the modern Internet and also correctly pointed out that the slow pace of IPv6 deployment was due in part to the lack of urgency of address depletion. Even with companies like Microsoft buying large sections of IP address space to fuel Azure, we’re still not quite at the point of the game when IP addresses are hard to come by.

So, with Mr. Huston taking up the shield, let me find my +5 Sword of NAT Slaying and try to point out a couple of issues in his defense.

Relationship Status: NAT’s…Complicated

The first point that Mr. Huston brings up in his article is that the modern Internet doesn’t resemble the one build by DARPA in the 70s and 80s. That’s very true. As more devices are added to the infrastructure, the simple packet switching concept goes away. We need to add hierarchy to the system to handle the millions of devices we have now. And if we add a couple billion more we’re going to need even more structure.

Mr. Huston’s argument for NAT says that it creates a layer of abstraction that allows devices to be more mobile and not be tied to a specific address in one spot. That is especially important for things like mobile phones, which move between networks frequently. But instead of NAT providing a simple way to do this, NAT is increasing the complexity of the network by this abstraction.

When a device “roams” to a new network, whether it be cellular, wireless, wired, or otherwise, it is going to get a new address. If that address needs to be NATed for some reason, it’s going to create a new entry in a NAT state table somewhere. Any device behind a NAT that needs to talk to another device somewhere is going to create twice as many device entries as needed. Tracking those state tables is complicated. It takes memory and CPU power to do this. There is no ASIC that allows a device to do high-speed NATing. It has to be done by a general purpose CPU.

Adding to the complexity of NAT is the state that we’re in today when we overload addresses to get connectivity. It’s not just a matter of creating a singular one-to-one NAT. That type of translation isn’t what most people think of as NAT. Instead, they think of Port Address Translation (PAT), which allows hundreds or thousands of devices to share the same IP address. How many thousands? Well, as it turns out about 65,000 give or take. You can only PAT devices if you have free ports to PAT them on. And there are only 65,636 ports available. So you hit a hard limit there.

Mr. Huston talks in his article about extending the number of bits that can be used for NAT to increase the number of hosts that can be successfully NATed. That’s going to explode the tables of the NATing device and cause traffic to slow considerably if there are hundreds of thousands of IP translations going on. Mr. Huston argues that since the Internet is full of “middle boxes” anyway that are doing packet inspection and getting in the way of true end-to-end communications that we should utilize them and provide more space for NAT to occur instead of implementing IPv6 as an addressing space.

I’ll be the first to admit that chopping the IPv6 address space right in the middle to allow MAC addresses to auto-configure might not have been the best decision. But, in the 90s when we didn’t have DHCP it was a great idea in theory. And yes, assigning a /48 to a network does waste quite a bit of IP space. However, it does a great job of shrinking the size of the routing table, since that network can be summarized a lot better than having a bunch of /64 host routes floating around. This “waste” echoes the argument for and against using a /64 for a point-to-point link. If you’re worried about wasting several thousand addresses out of a potential billion then there might be other solutions you should look at instead.

Say My Name

One of the points that gets buried in the article that might shed some light on this defense of NAT is Mr. Huston’s championing for Named Data Networking. The concept of NDN is that everything on the Internet should stop being referred to as an address and instead should be tagged with a name. Then, when you want to look for a specific thing, you send a packet with that name and the Internet routes your packet to the thing you want. You then setup a communication between you and the data source. Sounds simple, right?

If you’re following along at home, this also sounds suspiciously like object storage. Instead of a piece of data living on a LUN or other SAN construct, we make every piece of data an object of a larger system and index them for easy retrieval. This idea works wonders for cloud providers, where object storage provides an overlay that hides the underlying infrastructure.

NDN is a great idea in theory. According to the Wikipedia article, address space is unbounded because you just keep coming up with new names for things. And since you’re using a name and not an address, you don’t have to NAT anything. That last point kind of blows up Mr. Huston’s defense of NAT in favor of NDN, right?

One question I have makes me go back to the object storage model and how it relates to NDN. In an object store, every piece of data has an Object ID, usually a UUID of 32 bits or 64 bits. We do this because, as it turns out, computers are horrible at finding names for things. We need to convert those names into numbers because computers still only understand zeros and ones at their most basic level. So, if we’re going to convert those names to some kind of numeric form anyway, why should we completely get rid of addresses? I mean, if we can find a huge address space that allows us to enumerate resources like an object store, we could duplicate a lot of NDN today, right? And, for the sake of argument, what if that huge address space was already based on hexadecimal?

Hello, Is It Me URLooking For?

To put this in a slightly different perspective, let’s look at the situation with phone numbers. In the US, we’ve had an explosion of mobile phones and other devices that have forced us to extend the number of area codes that we use to refer to groups of phone numbers. These area codes are usually geographically specific. We add more area codes to contain numbers that are being added. Sometimes these are specific to one city, like 212 is for New York. Other times they can cover a whole state or a portion of a state, like 580 does for Oklahoma.

It would be a whole lot easier for us to just refer to people by name instead of adding new numbers, right? I mean, we already do that in our mobile phones. We have a contact that has a phone number and an email address. If we want to contact John Smith, we look up the John Smith we want and choose our contact preference. We can call, email, or send a message through text or other communications method.

What address we use depends on our communication method. Calls use a phone number. If you’re on an iPhone like me, you can text via phone or AppleID (email address). You can also set up a video call the same way. Each of these methods of contact uses a different address for the name.

With Named Data Networking, are we going to have different addresses for each resource? If we’re doing away with addresses, how are we going to name things? Is there a name registry? Are we going to be allowed to name things whatever we want? Think about all the names of videos on Youtube if you want an idea of the nightmare that might be. And if you add some kind of rigid structure in the mix, you’re going to have to contain a database of names somewhere. As we’ve found with DNS, having a repository of information in a central place would make an awfully tempting target. Not to mention causing issues if it ever goes offline for some reason.

Tom’s Take

I don’t think there’s anything that could be said to defend NAT in my eyes. It’s the duct tape temporary solution that never seems to go away completely. Even with depletion and IPv6 adoption, NAT is still getting people riled up and ready to say that it’s the best option in a world of imperfect solutions. However, I think that IPv6 is the best way going forward. With more room to grow and the opportunity to create unique IDs for objects in your network. Even if we end up going down the road of Named Data Networking, I don’t think NAT is the solution you want to go with in the long run. Drive a sword through the heart of NAT and let it die.

Is LISP The Answer to Multihoming?

Posted on by
1

LISPMultihoming

One of the biggest use cases for Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) that will benefit small and medium enterprises is the ability to multihome to different service providers without needing to run Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). It’s the answer to a difficult and costly problem. But is it really the best solution?

Current SMB users may find themselves in a situation where they can’t run BGP. Perhaps their upstream ISP blocks the ability to establish a connection. In many cases, business class service is required with additional fees necessary to multihome. In order to take full advantage of independent links to different ISPs, two (or more) NAT configurations are required to send and receive packets correctly across the balanced connections. While technically feasible, it’s a mess to troubleshoot. It also doesn’t scale when multiple egress connections are configured. And more often that not, the configuration to make everything work correctly exists on a single router in the network, eliminating the advantages of multihoming.

LISP seeks to solve this by using a mapping database to send packets to the correct Ingress Tunnel Router (ITR) without the need for BGP. The diagram of a LISP packet looks a lot like an overlay. That’s because it is in many ways. The LISP packets are tunneled from an Egress Tunnel Router (ETR) to a LISP speaking decapsulation point. Depending on the deployment policies of LISP for a given ISP, it could be the next hop router on a connection. It could also be a router several hops upstream. LISP is capable of operating over non-LISP speaking connections, but it does eventually need decapsulation.

Where’s the Achille’s Heel in this design? LISP may solve the issue without BGP, but it does introduce the need for the LISP session to terminate on a single device (or perhaps a group of devices). This creates issues in the event the link goes down and the backup link needs to be brought online. That tunnel state won’t be preserved across the failover. It’s also a gamble to assume your ISP will support LISP. Many large ISPs should give you options to terminate LISP connections. But what about the smaller ISP that services many SMB companies? Does the local telephone company have the technical ability to configure a LISP connection? Let along making it redundant and highly available?

Right Tool For The Job

I think back to a lesson my father taught me about tools. He told me, “Son, you can use a screwdriver as a chisel if you try hard enough. But you’re better off spending the money to buy a chisel.” The argument against using BGP to multihome ISP connections has always come down to cost. I’ve gotten into heated discussions with people that always come back to the expense of upgrading to a business-class connection to run BGP or ensure availability. NAT may allow you to multihome across two residential cable modems, but why do you need 99.999% uptime across those two if you’re not willing to pay for it?

LISP solves one issue only to introduce more. I see LISP being misused the same way NAT has been. LISP was proposed by David Meyer to solve the exploding IPv4 routing table and the specter of an out-of-control IPv6 routing table.  While multihoming is certainly another function that it can serve, I don’t think that was Meyer’s original idea.  BGP might not be perfect, but it’s what we’ve got.  We’ve been using it for a while and it seems to get the job done.  LISP isn’t going to replace BGP by a long shot.  All you have to do it look at LISP ALternate Topology (LISP-ALT), which was the first iteration of the mapping database before the current LISP-TREE.  Guess what LISP-ALT used for mapping?  That’s right, BGP.

Tom’s Take

LISP multihoming for IPv4 or IPv6 in SMEs isn’t going to fix the problem we have today with trying to create redundancy from consumer-grade connections.  It is another overlay that will create some complexity and eventually not be adopted because there are still enough people out there that are willing to forgo an interesting idea simply because it came from Cisco.  IPv6 multihoming can be fixed at the protocol level.  Tuning router advertisements or configuring routes at the edge with BGP will get the job done, even if it isn’t as elegant as LISP.  Using the right tool for the right job is the way to make multihoming happen.

The Five Stages of IPv6 and NAT

Posted on by
22

I think it’s time to put up a new post on IPv6 and NAT.  Mainly because I’m still getting comments on my old NAT66 post from last year.  I figured it would be nice to create a new place for people to start telling me how necessary NAT is for the Internet of the future.

In the interim, though, I finally had a chance to attend the Texas IPv6 Task Force Winter 2012 meeting.  I got to hear wonderful presentations from luminaries such as John Curran of ARIN, Owen DeLong of Hurricane Electric, and even Jeff Doyle of Routing TCP/IP book fame.  There was a lot of great discussion about IPv6 and the direction that we need to be steering adoption of the new address paradigm.  I also got some very interesting background about the formation of IPv6.  When RFC 1550 was written to start soliciting ideas about a new version of IP, the Internet was a much different place.  Tim Berners-Lee was just beginning to experiment with HTTP.  The majority of computers connected to the Internet used FTP and Telnet.  Protocols that we take for granted today didn’t exist.  I knew IPSec was a creation of the IPv6 working group.  But I didn’t know that DHCP wasn’t created yet (RFC 2131).  Guess what?  NAT wasn’t created yet either (RFC 1631).  Granted, the IPng (IPv6) informational RFC 1669 was published after NAT was created, but NAT as we know and use it today wasn’t really formalized until RFC 2663.  That’s right, folks.

The reason NAT66 doesn’t exist is because IPv6 was built at a time when NAT didn’t exist.

It’s like someone turned on a lightbulb.  That’s why NAT66 has always felt so wrong to me. Because the people that created IPv6 had no need for something that didn’t exist.  IPv6 was about creating a new protocol with advanced features like automatic address configuration and automatic network detection and assignment.  I mean, take a look at the two IPv6 numbering methods.  Stateless Automatic Autoconfiguration (SLAAC) can assign all manner of network information to a host.  I can provide prefixes and gateways and even default routes.  However, the one thing that I can’t provide in basic SLAAC is a DNS server entry.  In fact, I can’t provide any of the commonly assigned DHCP options, such as NTP server or other vendor-specific fields.  SLAAC is focused solely on helping hosts assign addresses to themselves and get basic IP connectivity to the global Internet.  Now, take DHCPv6.  This stateful protocol can keep track of options like DNS server or NTP server.  It can also provide a database of assignments so I know which machine has which IP.  But you know what critical piece of information it can’t provide?  A default router.  That’s right, DHCPv6 has no method of assigning a default router or gateway to an end node.  I’m sure that’s due to the designers of DHCPv6 knowing that SLAAC and router advertisements (RA) handle the network portion of things.  The two protocols need to work together to get hosts onto the internet.  In 1995, that was some pretty advanced stuff.  Today, we think auto addressing and network prefix assignment is pretty passé.

Instead of concentrating on solving the dilemma of increasing the adoption rate of IPv6 past the 1% mark where it currently resides, we’ve instead turned to the Anger and Bargaining phases of the Küber-Ross model, otherwise known as the Five Stages of Grief. The need for IPv6 can no longer be denied.  The reality of running out of IPv4 addresses is upon us.  Instead, we lash out against that which we don’t understand or threatens us.  IPv6 isn’t ready for real networking.  There are security risks.  End-to-end communications aren’t important.  IPv6 is too expensive to maintain.  People aren’t smart enough to implement it.  Any of those sound familiar?  Maybe not those exact words, but I’ve heard arguments very similar to that leveled at IPv6 in just the two short years that I’ve been writing.  Think about how John Curran of ARIN must feel twenty years after he started working on the protocol.

Anger is something I can handle.  Getting yelled at or called expletives is all part of networking.  It’s the Bargaining phase that scares me.  Now, armed with a quiver of use cases that perhaps 5% of the population will ever take advantage of, we now must delay adoption or move to something entirely different to support those use cases.  It’s the equivalent of being afraid to jump off a diving board because there is a possibility that the water will drain out of the pool on the way down.  The most diabolical is Carrier Grade NAT.  Let’s NAT our NATed networks to keep IPv4 around just a little longer.  It won’t cause that many problems, really.  After all, we’ve only got 65,536 ports that we can assign for any given PAT setup.  So if we take that limit and extend it yet another level, we have 65,536 PATed PAT translations that we can assign per CGN gateway.  That has real potential to break applications, and not just from an end-to-end connectivity point of view. To prove my point, fire up any connection manager and go to http://maps.google.com.  See how many separate connection requests are spawned when those map tiles start loading.  Now, imagine what would happen if you could only load ten or fifteen of them.  There’s going to be a lot of blank spots on the that map.

Now, for the fun part.  I’ve been accused of hating NAT.  Yes, it’s true.  I dislike any protocol that breaks basic connectivity and causes headaches for troubleshooting and end-to-end communications.  I have to live with it in IPv4.  I’d rather not see it carried forward.  That’s the feeling of many IPv6 evangelists.  If you think I dislike NAT, ask Owen DeLong his feelings on the subject.  However, to say that I dislike NAT for no good reason is silly.  People are angry at me for saying the emperor has no clothes.  Every time I discuss the lack of need for NAT66, the same argument gets thrown in my face.  Ivan Pepelnjak wrote an article about about using network prefix translation (NPT) in a very specific case.  If you are multihoming your network to two different providers and not using BGP then a case for NPT can be made.  It’s not the best solution, but it’s the easiest.  Much like Godwin’s Law, as the length of any NAT66 argument increases, the probability of someone bringing up Ivan’s article approaches approaches one.

So, I’ve found a solution to the problem.  I’m going to fix this one scenario.  I’m going to dedicate my time to solving the multihoming without BGP issue.  When I do that, I expect choirs of angels to sing and a chariot pulled by unicorns to arrive at my home to escort me to my new position of Savior of IPv6 Adoption.  More realistically, I expect someone else to find a corner case rationale for why IPv6 isn’t the answer.  Of course, that’s just another attempt at bargaining.  By that point, I’ll have enough free time to solve the next issue.  Until then, I suggest the following course of action:

The Land Of Opportunity

Posted on by
1

It’s been *checks watch* about 38 minutes since I last thought about NAT, so it’s probably time to sit down and write some more about it.  I’ve got an image to uphold after all.  I wrote about my position on NAT a couple of posts ago, and in it I discussed NAT64.  I railed against it much the same as introducing any kind of NAT into IPv6.  Ivan Pepelnjak, a very well respected and frighteningly intelligent networking rock star, listened to the Packet Pushers show that fueled my rant and read my blog post.  He then posted an article where he takes NAT64 and puts it into proper perspective.  I read through it, and guess what?

He’s absolutely right.

Yep, Ivan nailed that one.  NAT64, which is the process of translating IPv6 addresses into IPv4 addresses, has a use when it comes to allowing the IPv6 Internet to access content that is still stuck on the IPv4 Internet.  Without some sort of translation mechanism, those IPv6-only hosts will be walled off from the IPv4 Internet in general.  The other methods he discusses are either completely insane, like Carrier-grade NAT (NAT444), or are impractical from a support standpoint, like dual-stacking.  I happen to think dual-stacking is the way to go with this, but I don’t want to be the local ISP trying to support a D-Link router running a dual stack when someone’s mom calls for support.

Ivan’s final point of the article hits home in a way that should make people sit up and pay attention.  “The proper way to tackle this issue is to make your content available over IPv4 and IPv6. IPv4 clients won’t notice it and IPv6 clients will use native IPv6 connectivity bypassing NAT64.”  He’s spot on with this one too.  If you build your content aware of both IPv4 and IPv6, you won’t have any real issues when it comes to IPv6-only hosts.  I’m going to take this one step further, though.  Let me ask a question that I think really cuts to the heart of the Internet in general when it comes to content creation and consumption:

What content would you access that is IPv4-only?

Right now, that question would be answered with “everything”, since IPv6 adoption is spotty at best.  However, with World IPv6 Day looming in less than a month, the sponsor list is growing quickly.  Google, Yahoo, & Facebook are already on board, and 163 more companies are ready to flip the switch as well.  If you think about it, there’s a great importance that should be attached to making your content IPv6 accessible.  In my IPv6 presentation, I talked about the impact of new content providers in the APNIC region creating things that you won’t be able to see if you are on the IPv4 Internet, since they are out of IPv4 addresses totally at this point, for all intents and purposes.  However, look at it from the perspective of an IPv4-only content provider.  You’ve got all this great content that you want to serve out to your audience.  Many of your audience members are starting to hear about IPv6 and wonder how it will be implemented.  More still, like those in the APNIC region, are unable to view your IPv4 content right now.  For those hopping on the IPv6-only Internet, it probably looks a lot like it did back in Vint Cerf’s day – a whole lot of nothing.  If you want to stake your claim for your content, are you going to wait for someone to come out with a NAT64 appliance?  Are you going to sit around until an IPv6-to-IPv4 transition is possible on a load balancer?  If you are, you had best start packing up your office, because you won’t stick around for long.  The handwriting is already on the wall.

World of Warcraft, the largest Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) enabled IPv6 connectivity in their recent v4.1.0 patch.  They’ve been talking about it since March.  Now, those 10 million subscribers won’t have to worry about NAT64 if they get assigned an IPv6-only prefix.  They’ll just keep on playing the same way they’ve always played.  I think it’s going to end up being the same for 75% of the services that you use today.  Things like e-mail, calendaring, and popular websites will be IPv6 ready well ahead of any kind of IPv4 exhaustion.  Those that rely on advertising revenue won’t hesitate to get IPv6 enabled so as to not lose out on an untapped market of IPv6-only hosts.

Tom’s Take

NAT isn’t pretty.  It’s a necessary evil.  It has uses, and as Ivan pointed out they can be pretty important to keep the content-rich Internet from looking like a barren desert.  But at the same time, there is a path away from the need to slap a NAT64 band-aid on things.  By enabling IPv6 now, you avoid the expense and hassle of needing to wait for NAT64 to be finalized and argued about until the vendors are blue in the face.  You, as a content provider, can serve your content and ads and subscriptions to a whole new world of consumers in this new land of opportunity while the IPv4-only world gets left by the wayside, trying to figure out how to patch the problem rather than fixing it right the first time.

As a side note here, if you are at all interested in IPv6 and its implementation and impact, you need to sign up for Ivan’s excellent webinars.  He’s a genius when it comes to MPLS, IPv6, and datacenter networking.  In fact, do yourself a favor and save money by just buying a subscription to all of them.  At $199, it might sound like a pricey purchase, but since you’re going to want to listen to everything he’s got to say, it works out to be a great investment in your future.