s/IP/IPv4/g
Configuring my OS to prefer IPv6 addresses of DNS responses significantly reduced the number of web captchas I see (on NAT444 with native IPv6).
IPv4 is old and broken, use IPv6.
s/IP/IPv4/g
Configuring my OS to prefer IPv6 addresses of DNS responses significantly reduced the number of web captchas I see (on NAT444 with native IPv6).
IPv4 is old and broken, use IPv6.
I'd love to do that, if my ISP would provide me an IPv6 address. Windstream doesn't provide IPv6s. They did a trial a few years ago rolling it out and then undid it.
It's crazy I can get fiber to my house in the US, but not IPv6.
Your greedy ISP won't provide you with IPv6 for financial reasons - it's cheaper not to change or upgrade systems. This won't change until they start to provide you with IPv6 for financial reasons, as they reach the point where going to IPv6 starts to be a cost saving for them rather than having to run two different networks at once, with a whole bunch of CGNAT to keep the IPv4 part of it going.
iirc, hurricane electric was offering IPv6 via tunnelling somehow.
https://tunnelbroker.net
I was doing this back when I had BT in London, my internet speed back then was pretty abysmal and it would randomly drop routes- ironically this tunnel actually improved my internet (because of the routes not being dropped, not the speed).
They do this for free because they're a tier 1, meaning everyone pays to connect to them and they benefit from having more things hosted on their network. It's free because your ISP pays for it.
And they can always tell your ISP if they don't like paying to connect to the tunnelling server they should just implement v6.
Unfortunately, he.net tunnels have terrible reputation, so if you use this for your regular browsing, you're likely to get hit with more captchas than if you're on a cgnat with well behaved neighbors. Some sites will just not work, with no errors, because why waste errors on networks with bad reputation.
It wasn't always like this, but it was for me the last time I tried.
I think I had HE and Surfnet tunnels in the very late '90s already. IPv6 sure is taking some time...
Annoyingly, this will not work over CGNAT as far as I know - the tunnel needs 'both ends' to be accessible directly from each other I think.
There are cgnat provides who don’t also give you a real ipv6? Evil.
Try getting a /24 these days without paying a fortune. We NAT everything and still wait for IPv6 because the ISP CPE barely supports it. Land analogy is apt, landlords everywhere.
My ISP is only a few years old, but they don't support IPv6 at all. And when I complain about it to support, their response is basically "we don't see the point".
Practically everything on IPv6 also has a IPv4 address you can use instead. Adding IPv6 just adds more that can go wrong.
Sure, but if they're a new ISP, chances are they have a hard time getting IPv4 and they likely run CGNAT. If they run CGNAT, the benefit of IPv6 is there's a lot of high volume traffic that will move to v6 and the CGNAT use will be smaller. Routing v6 packets is much easier than tracking connection states and munging packets...
If they have enough v4 for all their customers, sure fine.
It's not just that the ISP will lower their costs for CGNAT, the users will also get a much better experience.
On IPv4 with CGNAT you get blocked and sent millions of captchas because you are sharing an IP with 5 IoT devices actively running a botnet.
On v6 you don’t have that problem.
This is an interesting take, however from what I seen its other way around. Most security conscious operators would only allow IPv4 instead of IPv6. Your ACL rules and tools are still better at handling/managing IPv4 compared to IPv6
> Most security conscious operators would only allow IPv4 instead of IPv6.
I strongly disagree. That's obsolete knowledge, thrown around by people who want to be considered security conscious but haven't actually updated their knowledge in many years. A statement with similar implications might be "security conscious operators require their users to rotate their passwords monthly", which is what a lot of people use to think a decade ago, and now what it really communicates is that you're talking to a dinosaur.
But IPv6 is complex and inherently globally accessible. Yes, NAT IS not supposed to be a firewall but it works like one nonetheless in many cases.
IPv6 will never replace IPv4 because it is a different protocol rather than merely a new version. The name is a lie.
> IPv6 is... inherently globally accessible.
No, it's not. If you really want a NAT there is no reason you can't use a NAT with ipv6. In fact, it can work even better because instead of using a random port for the translation, you can use a random ip address for each connection.
A random ip address that is globally reachable?
Why would it be reachable? It might be name-able but that doesn't imply reachable.
You're conflating the two parts of NAT: address translation and inbound filtering. A router can block any inbound traffic coming from WAN, even if the IPv6s on the LAN side are public.
In fact, hole punching for IPv4 shows this distinction. By default inbound traffic is blocked, but as soon as private host has opened up a connection, it is (indirectly) reachable and nameable (via the routers public IP + port).
BTW, static IPv4 NAT with public addresses on both sides exists as well.
Addressable means routable. Otherwise the distinction between a Public and Private address becomes one of firewall rules rather than a meaningful property of the IP Address.
And as you say, hole punching is still “PUBLIC IP” + port. Not an IP and any port you fancy unless the firewall was configured correctly.
Maybe I am wrong, maybe you’re confused, maybe IPv6 is just rubbish. Maybe all 3.
What do you mean globally accessible? All the devices on my network have global IPv6 addresses for the last 5 years - since my ISP enabled IPv6 but none of them are accessible unless I configure it.
Very weird take, and not supported by facts or evidence, but OK.
Do you ever wonder if most people don’t “see the facts” and after almost 3 decades and so much the adoption at 50% might mean to consider if the technology is just rubbish?
Most IPv4 "security" is a side-effect of NAT. NAT was not intended as a security feature, but it does provide a level of security in the common consumer implementation (PAT, single external IP, unroutable internal network.)
Otherwise, what are the practical differences?
There's more that's been written about configuring/protecting IPv4 networks and if you learn about network security from a mentor or from coworkers at a job, rather than reading books/the internet/LLMs, you're more likely to learn about IPv4 security.
But if you've ever had to deal with endpoint security, if you're just doing static rule based blocking/throttling, /32 or /24 blocking is often your best option. Thanks to CGNAT this often means having a pretty large impact since an ISP's residential customer might end up getting randomly assigned a "bad" address and the cooldown for these rules is often months long or more.
In IPv6 land, you can just block a /128 or even a /64 and rarely hit anyone else in the crossfire.
Blocking /128 is unlikely to block anyone for very long around here. Both the major ISPs give out /56 blocks with prefix delegation. In almost 4 years, mine hasn't changed.
There is no need for that, every modern OS prefer IPv6 over IPv4
Depends on the application, a web-browser that implements Happy Eyeballs protocol may prefer IPv4 if the IPv6 latency is higher.
I know little of this. How/why could one be higher latency over the other?
Different paths. If you’ve got a “dual stack” on your computer, give it a try.
tracert -4 google.com
tracert -6 google.com
I do get very different hops and latency.
However for “happy eyeballs” algo to fallback to IPv4, latency needs to be very bad on IPv6.
(I work on performance tuning a browsers happy eyeballs implementation)
Especially for DNS, browsers don’t wait “very long” for the AAAA (v6) record to be resolved when they already have the A record (v4) and will start the v4 connection after at max 50ms (iirc thats the spec value, but imo it is too long and most browsers wait less I think).
The good news is that if the AAAA still arrives later it will be cached, thus this only affects the first connection to a site.
As for the actual v6 connection being slower (lets say both A and AAAA come from cache) the browser will start a v6 connection and only fall back to v4 if the connection isn’t established within some time (I think the spec says 250ms).
And to make this all more complicated HTTP1/2/3 enter the decision matrix. I.e. should the browser rather try v4/http3 than v6/http2? Opinions probably differ.
All of this is also on the critical path to a website loading for the user, thats why all of those waits cannot be too long. At some point the benefit of the better protocol will be outweighed by waiting. Even worse if the website doesn’t support v6 and the wait was for nothing.
Happy eyeballs is more to fix totally broke ipv6 than speed differential.
For many years and even how there are networks that advertise they can do ipv6 and hand out real addresses but nothing works.
> IPv4 is old and broken
IPv4 is old, very old. But how is it broken? It's literally been working just fine since it came out.
That there are limited addresses is something else: it doesn't mean it's broken.
I don't care that spying/surveillance devices have more trouble spying on me with IPv4 than with IPv6 and I don't care that some apps have a harder time establishing connection.
IPv4 works. SSH over IPv4 works. Browsing the Web over IPv4 works.
IPv4 stopped working fine some 30 years ago. The invention of NAT was caused by IPv4 not working fine (RFC 1631 was written under assumption it's a temporary solution). Hole punching is a thing solely because IPv4 stopped working fine. Much like Y2K, the reason IPv4 appears to work fine is because absolutely massive engineering effort was put to work around the parts that don't work fine.
> IPv4 is old, very old. But how is it broken?
It is broken for you by upstream NAT and CGNAT.
You mean it's fixed by NAT and CGNAT. Because it's works just fine for me.
NAT and CGNAT break the basic idea of how the Internet was designed, forcing everyone into servers and consumers. We've just become used to it, and most people have never experienced it any other way.
The Internet was supposed to be a purely peer-to-peer network, where the addresses on each side of a connection pointed to an end node. That's why protocols like FTP or SIP break when NAT is used, and why you have to play games with port forwarding if you want to run services from your house (assuming you have a public IP address at all).
It's slightly unrealic idea though, as most of internet users are consumers, and that's the role they really prefer. That's why Dropbox gained popularity in spite of, you know, the fact that we all can do it with FTP.
> It's slightly unrealic idea though, as most of internet users are consumers, and that's the role they really prefer.
Because just about all applications are currently architected in such a manner.
When Skype first came out many moons ago it allowed peer-to-peer connections with clients, but a lot of clients were behind NAT (especially ones that could not do PCP or UPnP), so Skype had to come up with the notion of "super nodes" that could do relaying.
Protocols like STUN/TURN/ICE/etc had to be developed to deal with all of this blocking of traffic.
If clients could know their 'real' addresses and allow things like PCP (which is often needed for (e.g.) video games), then perhaps there could me less strictly consuming and more collaborating.
We couldn't do it with FTP. That's kinda the point. We didn't have static IP addresses for every machine or the entries in DNS to go with them.
The whole idea of "consumer" and "server" nodes is so baked into how people think about networking they don't even realize it. But that's not how the Internet was intended to be in the first place.
You absolutely can do it within the existing paradigm, in a number of ways, actually. Search for iroh, or DynDNS for example.
And if you seriously believe that Dropbox appeared because of NAT, and not because people prefer out-of-the-box solutions, I can only suggest you to go out of your bubble, and discuss technical issues with random people.
"Intended" btw is not even an argument. Internet wasn't intended for many things which we happily do here.
I'm well familiar with DynDNS. I used to run it before I got a real domain. It can't tell the difference between my laptop and my workstation, since they're both behind the same IP. I wasn't aware of iroh, but having looked it up, it's just a hack to get around problems that NAT has caused.
And yes, Dropbox does exist because of NAT, or more generally the fact that "consumers" are second-class citizens on the Internet. If everyone had a publicly routed address and an entry in DNS - which is how the Internet was originally envisioned - we'd have solutions that don't require a third party server.
Both of your examples just show how deep the Stockholm syndrome is. IPv4's limitations have shifted the way people think about networking so much that they rarely even realize they're doing it. But this isn't the way it was supposed to be. "Intended" is completely valid when we're talking about how something has strayed from its original design and the ramifications of it.
I'm not naive enough to think that we can ever get rid of the "consumer" and "producer" ideas that have crept into everyone's head. But it's important to remember that these ideas came about only because of limitations in the protocol, not because they're some kind of natural law of how global networks function.
> Search for iroh, or DynDNS for example
CG-NAT breaks all this. iroh relies on relays from people with non-broken internet (no CG-NAT).
>iroh relies on relays
Yes, and DynDNS too. Which is fine, cause it works, and that is what I said. The claim to which it replies is that people have to pay to Dropbox cause poor souls were stopped from sharing files using existing technologies like FTP by the damned IPv4, and not because they simply prefer an out-of-the-box GUI thing.
There were out-of-the-box GUI experiences, like Apple's "Back to my Mac", that never worked right because of all the issues with poking through NAT caused by IPv4.
Relying on peer-to-peer relays also doesn't scale, which is why Skype dropped its supernode architecture.
> That's why Dropbox gained popularity in spite of, you know, the fact that we all can do it with FTP.
Dropbox gained popularity *BECAUSE IT MADE IT EASY TO DO THIS WHEN YOU'RE STUCK BEHIND NAT TRASH*. By the time it was even a thought in anyone's brain the internet had already been ruined by that garbage.
It would never have existed in a world without NAT because it wouldn't have been needed, syncing data between computers you owned that all had publicly routable addresses is a much simpler problem.
Every ISP that has CGNAT v4 without providing full v6 needs to be shut down. They are either incompetent or actively choosing to make their users' service less useful to restrict them and/or encourage "upgrades". Internet service has a public routable IP address, period.
Only today we would have put everything behind something like NAT anyway because your devices would be getting hacked constantly.
>it would never have existed in a world without NAT because it wouldn't have been needed,
I'm sorry, but this claim is one of the brightest examples of false consenses effect I've seen in ages. People generally just prefer an icon on desktop to click/tap. And that's the reason Dropbox found its audience.
Now imagine if you didn't need that icon and Windows Explorer (or whatever file manager you use) could just connect to wherever your file is. Maybe through a "Favorite."
Then imagine the security implications of trusting windows to serve just some selected files over FTP and never have any security hole that exposed other files or allowed RCE
> It's slightly unrealic idea though, as most of internet users are consumers, and that's the role they really prefer. That's why Dropbox gained popularity in spite of, you know, the fact that we all can do it with FTP.
Dropbox gained popularity because none of us can or want to bother to do it with FTP, with the exception of a very small and determined minority.
Why do you think that even FANG engineers use cloud storage systems such as Dropbox/iCloud/OneDrive/Google Drive/etc. Can't an elite software engineer put together a FTP server?
Why do you think Dropbox et al are still a thing in spite of projects such as Syncthing?
This is not the only instance where user experience and convenience show their value. Look at Docker, for example. The "aktually" crowd will be fast to say that anyone can do the same with chroot et al, but they will again be missing the whole point. It's the same thing why Microsoft tried to invest in Aspire even though Docker is here.
It's like complaining that people can buy bread when all they need to make their own is flour, water, salt, and yeast. That's completely besides the point, ain't it?
> You mean it's fixed by NAT and CGNAT. Because it's works just fine for me.
CGNAT works for you? Do you play video games at all? Because there are all sorts of people for which it doesn't.
The fact that you may be fortunate enough to get a publicly-accessible IPv4 address on your WAN interface does not mean everyone else is. This type of attitude seems to be akin to "I gots mine."
I don't play this kind of games at all, but I still can sympathize with you if it's your preferred pastime, and it doesn't work as good as you'd like. I just don't think it warrants a conclusion that those nets in which we are arguing are broken. They are tangibly, observably doing pretty well. And I find that the idea that in a shiny world of pure IPv6 central servers/nodes would decentralize themselves comes from deep misunderstanding about what "normal" humans want.
Until a service's WAF catches your /32 because your ISP had previously handed it out to a spammer.
There are working procedures to follow in such situations, and minimally competent ISPs deal with them well enough so that most users don't even know the problem exists.