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Comment by anderstrier | Hacker News Reader

I describe those workarounds in my post as well. But that only solves the problem for me.

Making my ISP fix the underlying issue - that their TCP connection idle-timeout is too short - will make sure all their customers won't have to encounter this problem.

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Edit: I missed the part that their network used LSN.

Please read the post. My ISP already confirmed the problem, and told me that they expect to roll out a fix this week. I live in Denmark, and here it is fairly common that ISPs do Carrier-grade NAT.

I missed that part. I would not have expected that in Denmark. LSN is awful. You will be sharing source port depletion limitations with others in your network. That also means you can't host any servers unless you use port forwarding services or reverse vpns like hamachi. It also means you are sharing a SNAT with others on your network which means that malicious traffic from others could be attributed to you. Glad they are fixing it for you. If they didn't, then one would hope there were other ISP options.

Any ISP using LSN will have low NAT timeouts because it takes memory on their routers to track sessions and state. I would be surprised if your ISP remove timeouts unless they are letting it fall back to FIFO pruning on your segment. Did they tell you what they are changing?

It sounds like he's paid his ISP for a (dedicated) public IP, so it should be 1:1 NAT, which doesn't really need connection tracking.

For the rest of the customers that don't pay extra for a public IP, all the crappy things you mention do apply.

Hopefully, the ISP does native IPv6?

And, while 60 minute timeouts violate the RFC, it's a whole lot better than I expected. Usually CGN timeouts are around 15 minutes for nice ones, and I've seen 10 seconds at the bottom end.

I wish the longer ones would probe both ends of the connection to see if it's still live a minute or so before they intend to kill it.

What you say sounds very dramatic, but the truth is that CGNAT is good enough for 99.9% of users.

Yeah, my ISP uses it. It does come with some of the downsides the previous poster mentioned: the inability to make myself reachable from $the_world can be annoying, and I get a captcha on Google every time because of "unusual traffic" (I mostly use DDG, but sometimes fall back to it). Also, ACM blocked me at some point because "my IP is infiltrated by SciHub" (their words).

In the end, it's an imperfect solution for a real problem that mostly works well enough.

That's bullshit, CGNAT is likely to cause all sorts of issues that the average users aren't going to realize being caused by their "I"SP (A frequent one : being unable to host video game sessions). They aren't getting real Internet, and are being treated as second tier citizens.

What does their fix look like? I guess you can't change this limit for all connections otherwise they'd have to buy more IP addresses for their NAT routers, so maybe they only fix it for SSH connections, them being few?

I had the same problem and did the ~/.ssh/config trick years ago. Interested in contacting my ISP so that they fix the problem for all users (although it might be fixed now, idk).

Is there a list of Danish ISPs that do this?

I've had YouSee since I moved here, and I have a single public IPv4. I didn't realise that was not standard.

When I lived in Denmark, 3 would often use carrier-grade NAT, but not always. Based on talk with colleagues back then, it's quite common with mobile broadband.

Here in Finland, the situation is similar; when using mobile broadband you usually end up behind CGNAT.

Luckily, most ISP's will happily provide a static IPv4 for you for a small fee.

I think saying its common in denmark is properly overstating it a bit.

For wired connections I think its only the small newish ISPs + stofa that does CGN, the rest like tdc and telenor provides IPv4 to the CPE equipment.

I have hiper, they do CGN by default but if customers ask for it they can get a dynamic IPv4 for free or a fixed one for a small fee.

ServerAliveInterval and/or ClientAliveInterval fix that behaviour just fine, for everyone, if they use it.

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