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Comment by avianlyric | Hacker News Reader

The early teens didn’t have huge proliferation of ISPs using CGNATs.

These days ISP can’t get hold of new IPv4 blocks, and increasingly don’t provide public IP addresses to residential routers, not without having to pay extra for that lowly single IPv4 address.

Hosting a website behind a NAT isn’t as trivial as it used to be, and for many it’s now impossible without IPv6.

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> Hosting a website behind a NAT isn’t as trivial as it used to be, and for many it’s now impossible without IPv6.

The example I keep coming back to is multiplayer games like Mario Kart, where Nintendo tell you to put the Switch in the DMZ or forward a huge range of ports (1024-65535!) to it [1].

If you’ve got more than one Switch in the household, though, then I guess it sucks to be you.

1: https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Support/Troubleshooting/How-t...

To require that, the person would have needed to disable upnp on their router. I’ve played tons of multiplayer games on the switch and upnp handled it seamlessly on the 7 or 8 home networks I connected it to over its life. Never once even had to think about it.

So yes, if you disable the requisite, standard, built-in feature on your router, you may need a pretty annoying workaround. Weird!

What percentage of users do you imagine disable upnp? Let’s be real. This is a problem that your average user will never, ever experience a problem with.

No they wouldn't. UPnP is not requisite, certainly not standard, or necessarily built-in. For example, the router I've got doesn't implement UPnP. It's not unusual for it to be disabled, because it's a security issue that something with no authentication can punch enduring holes out through NAT. It's also irrelevant in a scenario where the ISP's using CGNAT.

I'm sure the Switch deals with conflict resolution with multiple consoles on the same network too but shrug it's another example of how NAT is a pain and also contradicts your assertion that incoming connections would be a breach of ISP ToS [1].

Edit: A quick Google suggests the Switch originally didn't support UPnP, and the Switch 2 now supports IPv6.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46484604

Ok, so it didn’t even need upnp then. Are you talking about using their LAN head-to-head feature across the internet? Or perhaps all the times I used my switch on various networks to play head-to-head games it was… my imagination? Sure. If people had to consistently forward every port on their home router to play Fortnite, smash, etc. with a portable console you’d never hear the end of it. This is literally the first time I encountered someone saying this was a problem. Regardless, most people don’t buy routers— they use the ones their ISPs gave them, and I haven’t seen one of those come without upnp in at least a decade. You’re seeking out reasons to dislike NAT.

>for many it’s now impossible without IPv6.

It's impossible with ipv6 either. ISPs block incoming connections on ipv6 for residential addresses.

And against the ToS of every US residential ISP I’ve looked at.

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