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The IPv6 Transition

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215 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 05:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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uobytx2 ◴[20 Oct 24 21:14 UTC] No.41898529[source]▶
People posting have mentioned that IPv4 is working for what they use the internet for. But of course it is. When NATs has been required for your whole life, how could the internet have built features that needed p2p routing? Just convince businesses to build something that requires special router configuration? And still wouldn’t work on phones or with ISPs that require CG NAT? You got what worked out of the box. You obviously couldn’t use what didn’t exist.
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tptacek ◴[20 Oct 24 23:08 UTC] No.41899246[source]▶
I can do more with the Internet today than I could with a static /22 assigned over my ISDN BRI back in the mid-1990s. A lot of things I would do back then, I would do differently today; running a chat system by connecting directly out to 6667/tcp feels pretty silly now, for instance. It's rough to build protocols that work that way today, but you're not missing much. Things were not better before the advent of presumptive NAT.
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1. uobytx2 ◴[21 Oct 24 16:28 UTC] No.41905779[source]▶
Well sure, I’m not trying to say that the internet is less capable generally now than in the past.

I’m suggesting that the way you build an app is shaped by the prevalence of NAT, the same way the apps you build are shaped by how much bandwidth home users have for devices.

Some types of apps benefit from p2p functionality, and those hit obstacles for normal users due to port forwarding requirements, and are largely impossible which CG. I don’t think NAT is a villain, just something that does affect what and how we build stuff.