Hacker News

points by matja 13 hours ago | 0 comments

s/IP/IPv4/g

Configuring my OS to prefer IPv6 addresses of DNS responses significantly reduced the number of web captchas I see (on NAT444 with native IPv6).

IPv4 is old and broken, use IPv6.

[–] thayne 54 minutes ago

My ISP is only a few years old, but they don't support IPv6 at all. And when I complain about it to support, their response is basically "we don't see the point".

[–] malfist 13 hours ago

I'd love to do that, if my ISP would provide me an IPv6 address. Windstream doesn't provide IPv6s. They did a trial a few years ago rolling it out and then undid it.

It's crazy I can get fiber to my house in the US, but not IPv6.

[–] dijit 12 hours ago

iirc, hurricane electric was offering IPv6 via tunnelling somehow.

https://tunnelbroker.net

I was doing this back when I had BT in London, my internet speed back then was pretty abysmal and it would randomly drop routes- ironically this tunnel actually improved my internet (because of the routes not being dropped, not the speed).

[–] cowlevel 11 hours ago

They do this for free because they're a tier 1, meaning everyone pays to connect to them and they benefit from having more things hosted on their network. It's free because your ISP pays for it.

And they can always tell your ISP if they don't like paying to connect to the tunnelling server they should just implement v6.

[–] alibarber 9 hours ago

Annoyingly, this will not work over CGNAT as far as I know - the tunnel needs 'both ends' to be accessible directly from each other I think.

[–] bombcar 1 hour ago

There are cgnat provides who don’t also give you a real ipv6? Evil.

[–] jon128 12 hours ago

  Our free tunnel broker service enables you to reach the IPv6 Internet by tunneling over existing IPv4 connections from your IPv6 enabled host or router to one of our IPv6 routers.

  https://tunnelbroker.net/

[–] sandeepkd 10 hours ago

This is an interesting take, however from what I seen its other way around. Most security conscious operators would only allow IPv4 instead of IPv6. Your ACL rules and tools are still better at handling/managing IPv4 compared to IPv6

[–] kstrauser 4 hours ago

> Most security conscious operators would only allow IPv4 instead of IPv6.

I strongly disagree. That's obsolete knowledge, thrown around by people who want to be considered security conscious but haven't actually updated their knowledge in many years. A statement with similar implications might be "security conscious operators require their users to rotate their passwords monthly", which is what a lot of people use to think a decade ago, and now what it really communicates is that you're talking to a dinosaur.

[–] asdf88990 1 hour ago

But IPv6 is complex and inherently globally accessible. Yes, NAT IS not supposed to be a firewall but it works like one nonetheless in many cases.

IPv6 will never replace IPv4 because it is a different protocol rather than merely a new version. The name is a lie.

[–] Karrot_Kream 6 hours ago

There's more that's been written about configuring/protecting IPv4 networks and if you learn about network security from a mentor or from coworkers at a job, rather than reading books/the internet/LLMs, you're more likely to learn about IPv4 security.

But if you've ever had to deal with endpoint security, if you're just doing static rule based blocking/throttling, /32 or /24 blocking is often your best option. Thanks to CGNAT this often means having a pretty large impact since an ISP's residential customer might end up getting randomly assigned a "bad" address and the cooldown for these rules is often months long or more.

In IPv6 land, you can just block a /128 or even a /64 and rarely hit anyone else in the crossfire.

[–] icedchai 5 hours ago

Blocking /128 is unlikely to block anyone for very long around here. Both the major ISPs give out /56 blocks with prefix delegation. In almost 4 years, mine hasn't changed.

[–] icedchai 5 hours ago

Most IPv4 "security" is a side-effect of NAT. NAT was not intended as a security feature, but it does provide a level of security in the common consumer implementation (PAT, single external IP, unroutable internal network.)

Otherwise, what are the practical differences?

[–] TacticalCoder 11 hours ago

> IPv4 is old and broken

IPv4 is old, very old. But how is it broken? It's literally been working just fine since it came out.

That there are limited addresses is something else: it doesn't mean it's broken.

I don't care that spying/surveillance devices have more trouble spying on me with IPv4 than with IPv6 and I don't care that some apps have a harder time establishing connection.

IPv4 works. SSH over IPv4 works. Browsing the Web over IPv4 works.

[–] Xirdus 5 hours ago

IPv4 stopped working fine some 30 years ago. The invention of NAT was caused by IPv4 not working fine (RFC 1631 was written under assumption it's a temporary solution). Hole punching is a thing solely because IPv4 stopped working fine. Much like Y2K, the reason IPv4 appears to work fine is because absolutely massive engineering effort was put to work around the parts that don't work fine.

[–] teddyh 8 hours ago

> IPv4 is old, very old. But how is it broken?

It is broken for you by upstream NAT and CGNAT.

[–] broken-kebab 7 hours ago

You mean it's fixed by NAT and CGNAT. Because it's works just fine for me.

[–] spauldo 5 hours ago

NAT and CGNAT break the basic idea of how the Internet was designed, forcing everyone into servers and consumers. We've just become used to it, and most people have never experienced it any other way.

The Internet was supposed to be a purely peer-to-peer network, where the addresses on each side of a connection pointed to an end node. That's why protocols like FTP or SIP break when NAT is used, and why you have to play games with port forwarding if you want to run services from your house (assuming you have a public IP address at all).

[–] broken-kebab 5 hours ago

It's slightly unrealic idea though, as most of internet users are consumers, and that's the role they really prefer. That's why Dropbox gained popularity in spite of, you know, the fact that we all can do it with FTP.

[–] throw0101c 4 hours ago

> It's slightly unrealic idea though, as most of internet users are consumers, and that's the role they really prefer.

Because just about all applications are currently architected in such a manner.

When Skype first came out many moons ago it allowed peer-to-peer connections with clients, but a lot of clients were behind NAT (especially ones that could not do PCP or UPnP), so Skype had to come up with the notion of "super nodes" that could do relaying.

Protocols like STUN/TURN/ICE/etc had to be developed to deal with all of this blocking of traffic.

If clients could know their 'real' addresses and allow things like PCP (which is often needed for (e.g.) video games), then perhaps there could me less strictly consuming and more collaborating.

[–] spauldo 4 hours ago

We couldn't do it with FTP. That's kinda the point. We didn't have static IP addresses for every machine or the entries in DNS to go with them.

The whole idea of "consumer" and "server" nodes is so baked into how people think about networking they don't even realize it. But that's not how the Internet was intended to be in the first place.

[–] broken-kebab 4 hours ago

You absolutely can do it within the existing paradigm, in a number of ways, actually. Search for iroh, or DynDNS for example.

And if you seriously believe that Dropbox appeared because of NAT, and not because people prefer out-of-the-box solutions, I can only suggest you to go out of your bubble, and discuss technical issues with random people.

"Intended" btw is not even an argument. Internet wasn't intended for many things which we happily do here.

[–] wolrah 4 hours ago

> That's why Dropbox gained popularity in spite of, you know, the fact that we all can do it with FTP.

Dropbox gained popularity *BECAUSE IT MADE IT EASY TO DO THIS WHEN YOU'RE STUCK BEHIND NAT TRASH*. By the time it was even a thought in anyone's brain the internet had already been ruined by that garbage.

It would never have existed in a world without NAT because it wouldn't have been needed, syncing data between computers you owned that all had publicly routable addresses is a much simpler problem.

Every ISP that has CGNAT v4 without providing full v6 needs to be shut down. They are either incompetent or actively choosing to make their users' service less useful to restrict them and/or encourage "upgrades". Internet service has a public routable IP address, period.

[–] broken-kebab 3 hours ago

>it would never have existed in a world without NAT because it wouldn't have been needed,

I'm sorry, but this claim is one of the brightest examples of false consenses effect I've seen in ages. People generally just prefer an icon on desktop to click/tap. And that's the reason Dropbox found its audience.

[–] throw0101c 4 hours ago

> You mean it's fixed by NAT and CGNAT. Because it's works just fine for me.

CGNAT works for you? Do you play video games at all? Because there are all sorts of people for which it doesn't.

The fact that you may be fortunate enough to get a publicly-accessible IPv4 address on your WAN interface does not mean everyone else is. This type of attitude seems to be akin to "I gots mine."

[–] broken-kebab 3 hours ago

I don't play this kind of games at all, but I still can sympathize with you if it's your preferred pastime, and it doesn't work as good as you'd like. I just don't think it warrants a conclusion that those nets in which we are arguing are broken. They are tangibly, observably doing pretty well. And I find that the idea that in a shiny world of pure IPv6 central servers/nodes would decentralize themselves comes from deep misunderstanding about what "normal" humans want.

[–] Karrot_Kream 6 hours ago

Until a service's WAF catches your /32 because your ISP had previously handed it out to a spammer.

[–] broken-kebab 5 hours ago

There are working procedures to follow in such situations, and minimally competent ISPs deal with them well enough so that most users don't even know the problem exists.

[–] w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 13 hours ago

There is no need for that, every modern OS prefer IPv6 over IPv4

[–] matja 13 hours ago

Depends on the application, a web-browser that implements Happy Eyeballs protocol may prefer IPv4 if the IPv6 latency is higher.

[–] nomel 9 hours ago

I know little of this. How/why could one be higher latency over the other?

[–] winstonwinston 7 hours ago

Different paths. If you’ve got a “dual stack” on your computer, give it a try.

tracert -4 google.com

tracert -6 google.com

I do get very different hops and latency.

However for “happy eyeballs” algo to fallback to IPv4, latency needs to be very bad on IPv6.

[–] bombcar 1 hour ago

Happy eyeballs is more to fix totally broke ipv6 than speed differential.

For many years and even how there are networks that advertise they can do ipv6 and hand out real addresses but nothing works.