Hacker News

points by spauldo 5 hours ago | 0 comments

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.

[–] spauldo 2 hours ago

I'm well familiar with DynDNS. I used to run it before I got a real domain. It can't tell the difference between my laptop and my workstation, since they're both behind the same IP. I wasn't aware of iroh, but having looked it up, it's just a hack to get around problems that NAT has caused.

And yes, Dropbox does exist because of NAT, or more generally the fact that "consumers" are second-class citizens on the Internet. If everyone had a publicly routed address and an entry in DNS - which is how the Internet was originally envisioned - we'd have solutions that don't require a third party server.

Both of your examples just show how deep the Stockholm syndrome is. IPv4's limitations have shifted the way people think about networking so much that they rarely even realize they're doing it. But this isn't the way it was supposed to be. "Intended" is completely valid when we're talking about how something has strayed from its original design and the ramifications of it.

I'm not naive enough to think that we can ever get rid of the "consumer" and "producer" ideas that have crept into everyone's head. But it's important to remember that these ideas came about only because of limitations in the protocol, not because they're some kind of natural law of how global networks function.

[–] kalleboo 3 hours ago

> Search for iroh, or DynDNS for example

CG-NAT breaks all this. iroh relies on relays from people with non-broken internet (no CG-NAT).

[–] broken-kebab 3 hours ago

>iroh relies on relays

Yes, and DynDNS too. Which is fine, cause it works, and that is what I said. The claim to which it replies is that people have to pay to Dropbox cause poor souls were stopped from sharing files using existing technologies like FTP by the damned IPv4, and not because they simply prefer an out-of-the-box GUI thing.

[–] kalleboo 2 hours ago

There were out-of-the-box GUI experiences, like Apple's "Back to my Mac", that never worked right because of all the issues with poking through NAT caused by IPv4.

Relying on peer-to-peer relays also doesn't scale, which is why Skype dropped its supernode architecture.

[–] 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.

[–] spauldo 1 hour ago

Now imagine if you didn't need that icon and Windows Explorer (or whatever file manager you use) could just connect to wherever your file is. Maybe through a "Favorite."