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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

IPv6 did not fail. It's used by a sizeable chunk of hosts, network owners made investitions in hardware, software and skills. It's not going anywhere, like it or not. Just like IPv4 will not go anywhere. They will coexist.

I still don't understand why IPv6 is a thing. End users can use NAT just fine. Servers can use CDNs and reverse proxies, sharing single IPv4 address among any number of hostnames. But it is a thing, so it's hard to imagine any other protocol to take over.

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IPv4 addresses are getting increasingly expensive. And being behind an ISP’s NAT is terrible. I don’t want to share an IP with my street. It should be easy to run little network servers at home without worrying about reverse proxies or upnp or whatever nonsense we need today to make the network work.

There’s plenty of numbers out there. Ipv6 lets my house have a whole subnet of them. It’s good.

I was (by default) part of a ISP based NAT. I play counterstrike online, and my ping was 80ms... calling them up and getting it disabled, dropped it to 30ms.

being behind their NAT caused all sorts of issues that i didnt realise they were causing... stuff like UPnP didnt work right, opening ports wasnt working right... everything was all over the place.

I don't believe that they're expensive when I can rent VPS for few dollars per month. They might be more expensive than 10 years ago, but this cost is shared among all people behind NAT, so in the end it must be a rounding error.

Running servers at home is a good thing to have, but I doubt that ISP cares much about users running servers at home. Users watch youtube and netflix. That's what they optimize for.

The version 4 address is now a substantial cost when renting a server. It starts getting billed separately, so you can drop it if you don't need it.

The days of getting a free IPv4 address when you rent a VPS are numbered. AWS is already rolling out a plan to charge by the hours for an IPv4 address and other VPN providers are paying attention.

> End users can use NAT just fine. Servers can use […] reverse proxies, sharing single IPv4 address

So you want all computers to be behind at least a single layer of NAT. And you also want people to not only have to purchase a domain but also have to pay their NAT operator to add their domain to the reverse proxy

Eyeball networks are vastly different from content networks. Even among the tinkerer "homelab" and HN crowds, it is rare to host content from the same connection/address you browse from.

You're confusing cause and effect.

They're very different precisely because of hacky nonsense like NAT.

How is (home) NAT making the problem more complex than a stateful firewall? You never want to have a policy where incoming connections/UDP streams are permitted by default to reach any random device on the network, regardless of whether that device has a routable IP or not.

Now, CGNAT is a different beast and more worrisome from that point of view.

How do you have two different devices running a webserver on two different IPs at home with NAT?

In a decade or two, everyone is going to be behind CGNAT. There are not enough IPv4 addresses.

> How is (home) NAT making the problem more complex than a stateful firewall?

ICE/TURN/STUN: the address that your software sees on your laptop, desktop, home NAS is not the address that clients can connect to.

In both NAT and non-NAT you have to use UPnP/PCP to do hole punching, but with NAT you have to do a bunch of address-y stuff as well.

'NAT' and 'fine' do not belong in one sentence.

NAT requires stateful tracking of stateless protocols. It's a hack much larger than anything related to ipv6.

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