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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

> Everything on my network is going to go through my firewall anyway.

Yes, and that's a very reasonable configuration.

But UDP hole punching (very widely used for VoIP, online gaming etc.) works orders of magnitude better with IPv6 than with IPv4, since there is no address and port translation to worry about.

With IPv4, it's very hit or miss, since it depends on both sides' NATs and also requires additional infrastructure (i.e. STUN discovery servers).

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> With IPv4, it's very hit or miss […]

It's also probably impossible if you're with an ISP that does CG NAT.

I've actually run into this helping a friend host a game server on their residential internet in a more rural part of Texas. They had to call their ISP and request a static IP address at an extra cost of something like $5/mo.

At that point, would a cheap VPS not work instead?

No. Game servers usually want high clock speed.

You’d just use the VPS as a proxy with a publicly accessible IP, and tunnel the connection back to your home. That would add latency that might be undesirable for a game, but maybe not.

Unless you're playing something like a turn based game, adding latency/hops is almost never desirable. Every multi-player game that I play is latency sensitive (and I don't play FPS games.)

The server in this case was the PC version of ARK which nom nom noms all the CPU/RAM.

Run a cluster of 12 Ark servers. Can confirm.

IPv6 Networks have Prefix Translation - but that's pretty mechanistic and not prone to the types of failures you see with PAT on IPv4.

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