What would have been your solution to needing more bits? More information is always going to be harder to remember.
The reason I'm an IPv4 advocate in the IPv4/IPv6 war is that the problem was "we're out of address", not "your thermostat should be natively routable from every single smartphone on the planet by default and inbound firewalls should become everyone's responsibility to configure for every device they own".
CGNAT is a feature, not a bug. Blending in with the crowd with a dynamic WAN IP is a helpful boost to privacy, even if not a one-stop solution. IPv6 giving everyone a globally unique, stable address by default is a regression in everyone's default privacy, and effectively a death sentence for the privacy of non-technical users who aren't capable of configuring privacy extensions. It's a wet dream for shady data brokers, intelligence agencies, organized crime, and script kiddies alike - all adversaries / attackers in threat modelling scenarios.
IPv6 adds configuration surface I don't want. Privacy extensions, temporary addresses, RA flags, NDP, DHCPv6 vs SLAAC — these are problems I don't have with IPv4. More features means more opportunities to footgun with misconfigurations, being forced to waste my time learning and understanding the nuances of each (in again, what amounts to system I want nothing to do with).
"Reaching your own stuff" is already a solved problem, too. Tailscale/Headscale gives you authenticated, encrypted, NAT-traversing connectivity. It's better than being globally routable. It's also opt-in for anyone who wants it, and not forced on anyone, unlike the IPv6 transition.
I don't have to rely on extra commercial entities to be able to reach my network.
I did have a problem with hosting my own shit because my ISP by default does cgnat. That cost me an hour of my life to convince a party to give what used to be normal, end to end connectivity.
Highly disagree. Middleboxes are a huge problem on global scale and have frozen any innovation below application layer. TCP and UDP even that they are on software not hardware layer cannot be updated or changed, see MPTCP efforts or QUIC giving up and building on top of UDP.
If this is so much privacy problem, IPv6 is there for many years reaching 50%+ deployments in some countries, I bet there should be concrete examples of such breaches and papers written.
> Reaching your own stuff is already a solved problem, too. Tailscale/Headscale
No address to receive communication - no problem install an app that would proxy it through someone who has the address. Tailscale/Headscale is great, using it daily, but they are not solution to the huge already build global network created to connect devices not connecting devices because lack of digits. Global is key here.
It's much more private and secure to run that Minecraft or Mumble server on an encrypted overlay network like via headscale + tailscale rather than exposing both services directly to the entire planet.
But again, the primary concern was only ever address space.
The additional security gained by getting everyone involved to set up and configure separate VPNs for different community utilities is not worth it.
Port forwarding has massive problems if you're running applications expecting certain ports and need multiple hosts to have public access to those ports.
Public servers would use a firewall, a load balancer, possibly a reverse proxy that does TLS too, between the internet and real app servers anyway. If anyone needs to host multiple servers from their home net, I would expect them to know this.
I've had game consoles with matchmaking issues with multiple consoles fighting over the same collection of ports
About the other stuff... well... maybe I'm too old, but I think you're doing it wrong.
1) Those aren't public services and they are NOT expecting certain ports. Public means that a random guy on the internet is able to connect to your service without any prior knowledge about it. HTTP(S) for web pages is one of those services. Owncloud is not, even if it uses HTTPS.
2) Since they're not public, each of those services can have its own port.
3) You shouldn't expose that stuff on the internet, even with a firewall. Use a VPN if you want access when you're away. Or a SSH tunnel. Or at least port knocking.
They're services I wish to consume outside my home
> they are NOT expecting certain ports
Damn near everything expects to be HTTPS/443
> Public means that a random guy on the internet is able to connect to your service without any prior knowledge about it
Public just means I have the option to allowing that traffic or not. I can choose to filter it through a lot of different means. IP filtering, authentication, etc.
> each of those services can have its own port
So I change having easy to remember names for weird odd ports and hope all the other applications handle these changes fine and deal with odd port forwarding issues.
> You shouldn't expose that stuff on the internet, even with a firewall. Use a VPN if you want access when you're away. Or a SSH tunnel. Or at least port knocking.
Wouldn't it be nice to have the option to not have to rely on such things and just be able to connect to things directly? And to have that identity stay consistent both in and out if the "local" network?
ipv6 is awesome.
Like I said, not public.
> Damn near everything expects to be HTTPS/443
So let it. Forward your own chosen port to 443 of the machine with the service.
> Public just means I have the option to allowing that traffic or not.
Nope. That's not what it means.
> So I change having easy to remember names for weird odd ports [...]
Easy to remember names comes from some DNS service, which can't work unless your public IP address stays the same and you can run your own public NS and can receive recursion from your main NS provider. In most parts of the world, I think, IP changes every time you restart the router, even IPv6. So what you have there isn't exactly typical for home users. That one extra service and complication that you don't actually need.
I don't have to remember anything HTTP(S). No ports, no IPs, no names, nothing. I use bookmarks.
> Wouldn't it be nice to have the option to not have to rely on such things and just be able to connect to things directly?
Wouldn't it be nice if there were no bad guys on the internet, no bots, and no zero days?
> ipv6 is awesome.
For Google and for you, maybe. But let me know how much you like it after your first cryptolocker. I suppose your backup storage is also public on the internet?
Outside the home, in other words in networks other than at home. Potentially without VPNs. Accessible from other public IP addresses, potentially limited scopes of those.
It seems you're thinking that allowing the traffic from other public networks is an all or nothing thing. That either you allow all public network traffic or none of it. That's just not true. If I know my office network is one prefix, and I know my friend's house is another prefix, and I know my cellular carrier in my city is usually this prefix, I can greatly limit the scope of access. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing, either its open to every single other device or only local devices, I can define exactly which networks or devices I want to allow the traffic from or not.
If I wanted to just let my friend's network audio receiver to connect to my music server, I can add it's public ip address and allow that traffic. No VPNs, no tunnels, no proxies, no non-standard port assignments, just directly allowing it to talk to the music server. All through the public internet, but still locking down my music server to just local traffic and his remote network audio receiver.
That's all still "public" networking.
> In most parts of the world, I think, IP changes every time you restart the router, even IPv6.
Often not with IPv6, prefixes stay pretty consistent usually. Not always true, but often true. I've had the same prefix for many, many years at multiple locations and multiple providers without having any kind of payment for static IP addresses.
> So let it. Forward your own chosen port to 443 of the machine with the service.
So now I have to remember the port for local and the port for remote along with different IP addresses for both, or I can just use the normal service port and the same IP address either way, and have one DNS entry for that IP address and it works anywhere I want it to.
> But let me know how much you like it after your first cryptolocker.
Entirely a tangential, unrelated point once you understand how things like "firewalls" actually work.
> I suppose your backup storage is also public on the internet
My most important backups are offline and offsite. But for other stuff, yes, it has a publicly routable IP address. Its not generally accessible publicly though. There are these things called "firewalls", they're really quite neat. One should also think about authn/authz as well next time you're working on your storage solutions as well, it'll do a lot to prevent cryptolocker issues you're so worried about.
For instance, AWS S3 is all technically accessible publicly. Its locked down by policies, not by NAT limitations. And yet its generally seen as a very secure place to store things, assuming one has the right policies in place. It doesn't take it being behind a NAT to be secure, because if that's the major part of your security posture preventing your stuff from getting cryptolocker'd you're doing things very, very wrong.
> I use bookmarks
Ok, and you hop on someone else's computer and...where are my bookmarks? Oops! Or I want to connect back to my media server from a friend's streaming device...where are my bookmarks? Oops!
And once again I bring up things like game consoles and other P2P applications which just work far better with actual publicly routable IP addresses directly. Strict NAT configurations will often cripple these services and good luck trying to have multiple consoles operating at once. CGNAT makes online gaming for some of these consoles just completely unusable, but if we just supported IPv6 it would have no problems.
But it's still private use, not a public service. The fact that you access it from the internet side doesn't make it public.
What you are describing here is in stark contradiction with your claimed easy to use IPv6. Why go through all this trouble if you wanted something easy to use as you describe IPv6?
> So now I have to remember the port for local and the port for remote along with different IP addresses for both, or I can just use the normal service port and the same IP address either way, and have one DNS entry for that IP address and it works anywhere I want it to.
No, you remember just your global DNS name which would be independent of ISP, geo location or router used, and work with dynamic allocated IPs too, and remember or bookmark a port number for each service. Reflection in the router would make that combination (name+port) work from inside the LAN too.
>> But let me know how much you like it after your first cryptolocker.
> Entirely a tangential, unrelated point once you understand how things like "firewalls" actually work.
Oh, I know how they work, at least in Linux, I do. It's a 1 (one!) wrong setting away from exposing everything using IPv6 inside the LAN.
> For instance, AWS S3 [...] And yet its generally seen as a very secure place to store things
Do you really belive that? Really?
> Or I want to connect back to my media server from a friend's streaming device...where are my bookmarks?
OMG! And let his favorite cloud providers index my music collection?? No thank you! I ask for the 3.5 jack cable and connect my phone. Or BT pairing code.
A service I'm using its public IP for, routing through public network connections over the public internet, but somehow its not public networking its private networking despite private networks not really being involved. Got it. Having firewall rules suddenly makes it private networking, somehow.
> remember or bookmark a port number for each service
Or just don't, because I've got quintillions of public IP addresses just lying around. I can even have multiple instances of the same service running on the same box all running the same standard port numbers because I can just grab yet another IP address all day long. Why limit myself to having to memorize weird ports when I can just use the standard ones?
It's a private service exposed to public networks when it shouldn't be. That's not how it's done. You are taking risks. I'm sure others would agree with me if this article wasn't this old.
> Why limit myself to having to memorize weird ports when I can just use the standard ones?
For the reasons I explained before, mainly LAN security and DNS not working with dynamic IP allocations. But, go ahead, have it your way. Each of us have our own priorities in life. Convenience is a valid choice. Keep those offline backups updated.
Its not how it was done because of NAT. You just couldn't have done it that way for a long time. We don't need NAT anymore.
> For the reasons I explained before, mainly LAN security and DNS not working with dynamic IP allocations
But once again, its not actually changing the security characteristics at all compared to choosing weird ports and having to deal with reflection issues. The service is still opened either way, just one requires you to choose other ports.
IPv6 predates those by decades.