An Introduction to NAT64 (opens in new tab)

NAT64 is useful to allow IPv4 services to work in an IPv6-only environment. It's nice to only have one stack to administrate, and IPv6 is generally more flexible, but you often need to fall back to IPv4.

NAT64 is more and more used instead of CGNAT (well, it's still CGNAT to an extent), but I don't really see one being advantageous over the other. Only that there are only IPv6 semantics when using NAT64, so stuff like roaming, privacy extensions, etc. works, and you don't have to rely on dual-stack.

I think the big advantage to NAT64 is identifying the pain points (incompatible equipment, applications, etc) in an IPv6-only world. And it really is a clear transition path to IPv6.

They're different things. NAT64 is useful for bridging between ipv6 and ipv4 networks, it's just a way of encoding ipv4 addresses in ipv6 addresses. It's more straightforward than ipv4 nat because there's no port rewriting.

Avoiding dual-stack is one big reason. NAT64 is also a key component of 464XLAT, which is technically superior to NAT444 as it only requires one NAT gateway instead of two.

Fun fact: I wrote the initial version of that page. I taught networking lessons at a university, IPv6 transition mechanisms were one of the topics we covered, and this one didn't have an article, so I wrote it. It was quite funny when one of the students realised it was who wrote it when they went to Wikipedia wanting to learn more :)

It's a follow up to the second part and covered in the first minute of the video as review anyways.

Oooh, I actually have a use for this. Any interest in open sourcing it?

thanks for the feedback, I'll tune the sound quality for the next episode