Re: NAT Not Needed To Make Renumbering Easy

[Christian Vogt <christian.vogt at ericsson.com>]

On Nov 5, 2009, Sam Hartman wrote:

> There are a number of ways to do this, including hashing the six-tuple
> (five tuple plus flow ID) to choose an exit.

Yes, this is an alternative to what is described in the paper I referred
to.  It is an interesting idea actually.

> None of this allows you to fail over a connection.

Correct.  Another question is whether session failover is a requirement.
This may depend on the type of network we look at.  In some networks,
if failovers happen infrequently, a simple solution that causes some
sessions to break in the event of a failover may actually be acceptable.

All this requires extra intelligence in applications, of course: for NAT
traversal, and potentially for automated session re-establishment.  But
one may argue that applications require this functionality already  
today.

- Christian