Damn, this thread moved too quickly. Excuse me for responding to some older posts.
So, all of this IPv6 discussion reminded me of an article I read recently, and made this thread the most appropriate in which to mention it:
https://blog.infected.systems/posts/2024-12-01-no-nat-november/ (
archive)
It's No NAT November. Get it guys? It's just like No Nut November. I'll admit that's a clever title, and also very appropriate, since disabling IPv4 is about as meaningful and productive as not masturbating for a month with absolutely no reason behind it. Surprise surprise, it doesn't work. By the second day, he started using NAT64, just hosted by someone else. IPv6 is a joke.
One of the cornerstones of the original Internet Protocol design was to have a flat, global address space.
In order to do that, you need global, reachable* addresses for every device connected to the Internet.
I'm reminded of something David Clark wrote in
Designing an Internet. While that was one of the original design assumptions, the creation of NAT proved that it was unnecessary. The Internet is a complex system that assumes very little, and that's one assumption that was later discarded. Any future Internet must take these kinds of hard lessons into account. It's a good book, I recommend it. NAT isn't solely a bad thing, I believe he calls it
coerced delivery, when the design of the network segment forces traffic through a certain point, even when the sender would prefer otherwise. I don't have my copy of the book at my side right now, but
topological delivery is a similar concept. He creates a whole three-dimensional model to describe this kind of thing.
What is actually wrong with this?
There's nothing wrong with non-textual logs, I refuse to call them binary logs. UNIX in particular does absolutely nothing to distinguish text from any other kind of data. Now, UNIX programmers are supposed to love when programs shit into each other's mouths, forming an inhuman centipede, but this for some reason isn't good enough when it comes to logs. Notice the cries of bit-flips and other things that start cropping up when they need an excuse. It's common sense for data to have a form suited to machines and the ability to convert that data to a form suited to humans, which is necessarily easier than vice versa, but UNIX programmers lack common sense.
