Question

Grettings,

thanks in advance

explain on this.

Discuss 5 reasons why people still prefer NAT (Network Address Translation) adoption rather than IPv6. ?

Answer 1

It is a common belief that IPv4 addresses are running out. Every device on a network needs to be uniquely identified by its IP address, and the problem is that there are simply not enough IPv4 addresses.

The key advantage of IPv6 is that its addresses are 128 bits in length, as opposed to the 32-bit length of IPv4 addresses. This results in a huge number of IP addresses. However the big question is are we really running out of IPv4 addresses? If so, IPv6 is certainly a reasonable solution. But thanks to Network Address Translation (Nat), IPv4 addresses are, in fact, far from depleted. Nat offers the ability to share a single public, globally routable IP address among many internet hosts. This is valuable in the IPv4 world, where public IP addresses are, by necessity, conserved.

Network Address Translation (NAT) is the process where a network device, usually a firewall, assigns a public address to a computer (or group of computers) inside a private network. The main use of NAT is to limit the number of public IP addresses an organization or company must use, for both economy and security purposes.

Reasons to use NAT:

1. Key benefits of NAT are IPv4 address conservation, ease of management, and IP address and application privacy. NAT enables unregistered IP addresses used by private networks to connect to the internet. NAT can also makes use of ports for direct IPv6-IPv4 communication by using NAT-PT. NAT overloading or PAT is used for translating addresses by using ports instead of one-to-one IPv4 address translation. Translations come with Static or Dynamic translation methods.

2. The internet is made up of millions of routers and switches. Those were initially designed to work with IPv4. Replacing or upgrading them takes time and budget. There will still be many old home gateways, print servers, ... unaware of and incompatible with the IPv6 protocol.

3. During the design of the IPv6 protocol, backward compatibility was not on the requirements list. This lack of compatibility with the current IPv4 protocol was the single critical failure. Because of this, the transition towards IPv6 does not provide a single, standardized solution to communicate with devices and systems that still run IPv4.

4. It is expensive if you consider training and configuration time. IPv6 is a significant change for most network admins. While the ISPs might see advantages to switching most SMB will only see increase complexity for most of their IT staff who are currently used to IPv4.

5. DHCP for IPv4 can provide clients with IP addresses, DNS servers, default gateways, TFTP servers, and pretty much anything else. DHCPv6 doesn’t have an option for providing a default gateway. If you want to push a default gateway to clients, you have to use SLAAC.

6. Nat helps to obscure the interior of a private network, making network scanning difficult, and it functions as a poor man's firewall. Nat opponents claim that a properly designed and implemented stateful firewall will serve the same purpose.