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Can Large Scale NAT Save IPv4?
Julie188 writes "The sales pitch was that IPv6, with its zillions of new IP addresses, would eliminate the need for network address translation altogether. But Jeff Doyle, one of the guys who literally wrote the book on IPv6, suggests that not only will NAT be needed, but it will be needed to save IPv4 at the tipping point of IPv6 adoption. 'I've written previously that as we make the slow — and long overdue — transition from IPv4 to IPv6, we will soon be stuck with an awkward interim period in which the only new globally routable addresses we can get are IPv6, but most public content we want to reach is still IPv4. Large Scale NAT (LSN, also known as Carrier Grade NAT or CGN) is an essential tool for stretching a service provider's public IPv4 address space during this transitional period.'"
Of course it could fit most people needs who, by the way, don't even know what having a unique IPv4 address means, forget about knowing what a fixed IP address is. My only concerns would be towards people hosting services, even if they only host a gaming server.
Before getting a fixed IP address, I remember using services like dyndns before I setup my own private dyndns server on a fixed IP address server that I had access to. I could always reach my system even if it changed address every 6 hours on the first dialup provider I registered to back then.
So yes, it could, my only concerns is that it may cause prices to have a unique address or a fixed address to rise.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Stop the madness. Give us ip6. We (as a society) would gain so many productive hours without NAT and the shit that comes with it. (Portforwarding etc). We have the technology ready to go and give everything it's unique ip. Can we please use that tech? It's not like it's high-tech or to new to be implemented by now.
For years we've heard predictions about how we'll run out of addresses "this year." Yet we haven't.
I assume that's partly because my toaster doesn't have an IP, but it's also got to be because of NAT.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
to ask someone from Rosenet, in Thomasville GA, who have NATted *all their customers* for some years now.
I expect they've learned all the necessary lessons.
I don't want these stupid ideas to limit us and bring us back so many years. Implement IPv6 and get on with it already, for fuck's sake.
If you're a Qwest customer in Omaha like my inlaws, you get a non-routable from the head end... and the last time I was there, they did not support VPN passthrough (although IIRC you could pay extra for a routable dynamic IP if you wanted VPN to work).
I don't buy the premise. Why do you *need* to save IPv4? Why the heck not move to IPv6? Let IPv4 go already.
Obviously you haven't had to deal with an entire organization using one IP for several thousand users,
and each user forced to use a NAT again to "protect" against other members of the organization.
Two layers of NAT defeats ALL dynamic DNS, and return traffic.
And this is the goal of every major ISP I've had contact with. They want to force you to use their
servers, and pay for it.
Never mind that they can't handle the problems of that.
at work we use NAT behind a whole public class B and it work great. But as a customer I would not put up with it. I want to act as a server not only a dumb host. So please stop the carrier grade nating madness.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
So the same guy advocated IPv6 and now it's IPv4 again? I'm dazzled! This sounds like what you hear during an election.
Most P2P protocols have at least some trouble working with local NAT. If it was implemented on a large scale there might be a few more problems, and it certainly gives ISP's (the ones running the NAT) more control over the traffic they route. I wonder how quickly the RIAA and friends will pick up on that and start pushing for NAT instead of IPv6...
I never understood why some people are determined to get as much mileage out of IPv4 as possible before going to IPv6. An aggressive move towards IPv6 would probably revive a decent part of the IT industry. Now is as good a time as ever.
The only thing holding us back is carriers are all looking at each other waiting for someone to go first as it will definatly be an expensive transition and will introduce a few unknowns into their network cores which they pride on being extremely reliable. Although I know some carriers are running dual stack on their cores to test it all out as we speak.
Large scale or ISP wide NAT is part of the solution. It will not "save" IPv4, whatever that means. It will make it possible to transition to IPv6 and still access all the old sites, that have not yet made the transition.
It is not really important that slashdot.org is still IPv4 only. You can access it just fine. And slashdot.org has no need to access you.
You use IPv6 in all the cases where you wanted that nice static IPv4 address before: When running peer to peer software. Setting up your small hobby server. Using direct peer to peer VoIP. And so on.
All the consumer ISPs will transition soon enough during the next few years. We will fairly quickly be able to assume consumers will in fact be able to access IPv6 only sites. For the next 10 years you can also assume consumers will be able to access IPv4 only sites - is anyone really surprised by that?
If all your gaming friends got IPv6, playing on your private IPv6 only game server - what do you care that some backwards dialup only ISP, in a country you never heard of, still is IPv4 only?
No
p1. IPv4 doesn't need to be "saved" from any kind of calamity. It's doing just fine, thank you very much.
p2. The transition to IPv6 is probably going to need some NAT64 and DNS64 magick at some point. Not everybody is going to be well-served by running dual-stack hosts and networks. I've heard that some mobile broadband providers are looking at various kinds of NAT tricks to keep IPv4 marginally functional for legacy applications on IPv6-only networks without resorting to expensive tunnel encapsulation mechanisms.
p3. Repeat after me: IPv4 is fine. It will still continue to work just the same as it does today after the last address is allocated by the last registry. It just won't be growing anymore, but that's fine. It doesn't need to grow. That's why we have IPv6, which can grow for at least another century before there might conceivably be a problem.
p4. So globally routable IPv4 addresses will soon start getting more expensive (and the future value of an address is already hard to predict). That was always going to happen. It's not like there's any surprise here. But look on the bright side, you have TWO ways to get your IPv4-only private network reachable over IPv6: A) transition to IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack network or B) deploy a NAT-PT gateway. (Okay, I'm cheating here. I know that only one of those two will ever make any economic sense, but I'm trying to be nice.)
p5. IPv4 is doing fine. Go back to sleep. There's nothing to see here. Pay no attention to the geeks behind the curtain. You don't want to know what they're doing anyway. Probably something weird and unsavory, right? Go back to sleep. IPv4 is doing fine. Stop worrying. It's okay.
jhw
There are only 65536 port numbers, so there is only so thin that you can spread a single IP address. Remember that some clients open many ports. There are also questions of reuse; you can't simply cram the 65536 space close to full. When a TCP connection terminates, you don't want to start reusing the port number right away. It's tricky.
People are not going to be happy to be NAT ed. Will large scale NAT also come with large scale port forwarding? Large scale UPnP? What do you do about port number abuses?
Dynamic DNS goes out the window. People can't have a quasi static IP any more with their own port 80, port 22, port 25 mail server or whatever.
If I were to be NATed, I would not want to pay more than 5 dollars a month for such a crippled connection, regardless of bandwidth. So you will automatically have to sell the service to ten subscribers like me instead of just one to make the same revenue.
As long as I can get non-NAT-ted service somewhere, than that is where I will be.
NAT == CRIPPLED_INTERNET. Impose that next door. Next city. Next country. NIMBY: not in my backyard.
And remember that if EVERYONE is NATted, then nobody can talk to anyone. Because you have to connect somewhere to use the Internet. That means resolving DNS to some IP address.
To reach a DNS server you need an IP address. So the DNS server can't be NATed. That DNS server has to hand you the IP address of a host such as a web server. Are all web servers going to be NAT ed? That means they can't be all on port 80 any more. You are looking at redirects! There will have to be a port 80 service sitting on those NAT nodes, which will intercept web traffic, parse the HTTP request and forward to the appropriate node behind the NAT.
Or else DNS will have to be re-architected so that it returns not only IP's but port numbers, so when you go to www.somewhere.com, it resolves to x.y.z.w:n, and the host x.y.z.w has port n forwarded to the right server.
Good grief, and good luck with that.
Mostly because it's expensive, painful, and older versions of most operating systems don't properly support it. No one wants to deal with the dramas before they absolutely have to. That and there's the fact that as far as I can tell the one and only killer feature of IPv6 is a larger address space and having every item have a publicly addressable IP, which isn't a really huge selling point especially when you consider that while IPv4 addresses are easy to remember, IPv6 addresses are not.
Most people don't want to run servers, NAT and port forwarding isn't all that hard to set up, and not every device needs or even should have a public IP address. There's still a whole bunch of unused Class A's floating around that were picked up by companies who were there in the early days and who aren't actually using them, I'm sure a lot of those will be reclaimed before we run out of space. Hell I'm sure Sun had a couple which Oracle doesn't need.
there is an easy way to get the transition to IPV6 over with.
one of the major backbones has to tell all its lower-level customers 'prepare for the transition or else'. give them a deadline of 18 months. if they haven't moved to ipv6 by then, cut them off.
of course, the big backbones won't do it because it might lose them customers. so we're all screwed.
The same reason why people are determined to take America back to the 50s. Change is costly and at time you make the wrong call. And ultimately it's scary.
The changes that businesses make tend to be the ones that either improve their profit margins immediately or the things that consumers demand. Ever notice how lately every store has to have air conditioning? It's not because it's profitable per se, it's because if you want to have customers they have to come into the store, and they won't come into your store if your store is the only one without AC.
I was once told by another fellow Slashgeek, regarding the IPv6/IPv4 debate, that "one cannot boil the ocean"! I think we probably need these interim steps and solutions.. that's probably the only way things will continue working during the changeover. We do have to be careful not to fall into the trap of implementing an interim measure and getting stuck with it for a long time, when the better solution is almost never reached as soon as was desired. How many systems get implemented to be "temporary" and then become production for years?
At the same time, massive direct cutover changes almost never work. Although, that may not be entirely true - the recent change from analog to digital television seems to have gone reasonably well and that was a direct cutover.
6d
We have 3.7bn IPV4 addresses. That won't even cover 1 device per person, before even taking into account losses due to subnetting. The population is growing exponentially, and we should probably plan on the number of IP enabled devices growing even faster than that (higher number of devices per person).
NAT, large scale or otherwise is only a band-aid delaying the inevitable.
Its a horrible hack that breaks many protocols and causes all sorts of problems when you want to (say) join two previously private networks together only to find that they're using the same internal network range.
NAT got us through the late 90s while IPV6 was being finalized. It is truly time to let IPV4 go and get on with the changeover. Other countries (china) are already implementing large-scale IPV6 networks due to an inability to acquire IPV4 - so it can certainly be done.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The other side of big NATs is that they could make IPv6 unnecessary. With big NATs everybody could have private IPv4 space with the public IPv4 space being used to connect the private spaces.
Protocols that don't like NATs are protocols that violate the principle of independence of protocol layers. Things like SIP and FTP are hard to NAT because they carry lower level addresses. Nobody cares about FTP any more but SIP is a security and implementation nightmare that is going to need to be re-designed from scratch anyway.
The net is moving towards a world in which users see the net not as a means to transport packets end-to-end but rather as a platform to support various applications. That means that what is becoming important are application level gateways to bridge application services rather than a seamless IP address space.
Hah. The only way this will work is if they make an extremely good IPv4/IPv6 NAT gateway. Except, if they make one that does a good job such that people are going IPv4->IPv6->IPv4 and everything basically works, then people will wonder why they don't just do an extremely good IPv4 NAT solution and go IPv4->IPv4 and drop the entire IPv6 part.
Add to this how many more NAT workarounds we will need to have in software. We already have to deal with NAT busting solutions, now we will have to deal with double NAT busting solutions. Believe me, NAT was a workaround to a limitation and we shouldn't be using this workaround at any more levels than necessary.
There is only so much duct tape you can use before it is time to just accept you will have to install the new solution.
If IPv6 appears so hard, its because people keep on waiting for someone else to take the plunge. If you are an IT professional, then is should be your business to understand and embrace IPv6, whether that is in your network or in your software. If your issue is with your router not supporting IPv6, then make some noise to your router's manufacturer, install a third-party firmware or go with a company already offering an IPv6 capable router.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Maybe could save IPv4... but will kill internet.
In addition to using NAT to conserve IPv4 space it is still being sold as a more secure setup. NAT provides obscurity but not really security. A decent firewall is only going to allow what you configure it to allow. The only benefit I can think of is it may reduce the scope of subnet scans your network is subjected to. Then again, the bots/scripts are scanning em all anyway.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Maybe they can start at the backbones by converting to IPv6 and NAT to the rest of the world. Then, they can implement IPv6 as they reach out and keep pushing the NAT farther and farther out until it's at the ISP level (where hopefully they've been starting to work on their own IPv6 implementation).
What we really should do it have a cut off day, like digital TV, for the switch to IPv6. It worked great for TV! :)
-m
http://www.invisik.com
http://www.ipv6porn.co.nz/ is giving away free porn to anybody who can access it with an ipv6 address
This would be great for pirates, who the hell would the MPAA and RIAA sue if everybody in one region shared a single IP#?
iptables -s YOU -p tcp --dport ! 80 -j DROP
We should have huge NATs connecting large private spaces together, with most people talking through multiple layers of NAT?
FTP and SIP don't work because they "carry lower level addresses", like what, IP addresses? It's not like they use the MAC to connect.
Are you insane?
Yes, there will be Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) used for the time to be. You will primarily see if in Mobile Wireless networks for handsets that don't require a full Internet connection but other ISP's will eventually be forced to do the same. That said, CGN is required so that we can do Dual Stack (where you have both an IPv4 and IPv6 address). This is the most commonly accepted transition technique and really the best available. It works by using the DNS system to determine if the name you are trying to resolve has a AAA or AAAA (referred to as a Quad A) record. The IP stacks of today are set to prefer Quad A over AAA records so if a site has a IPv6 address (or Quad A record) you will hit the site using your IPv6 connection. CGN is a IPv4 technology and not a IPv4 to IPv6 Gateway. CGN just allows us to do a massive amount of NAT44 that most of our current NAT devices can't handle.
Really there is nothing to see here that hasn't been said over and over again on every "World ending IPv4 shortage" article on Slashdot. Yes, the threat is real. Does it really matter to many people outside of Service Providers, not really because almost everyone else is doing NAT44 today anyone in one form or another. As usual, what should be taken from this is that if you are a Network Engineer responsible for managing a network, you should be taking the time to take inventory of your IPv4 space and making plans for implementing Dual stack in the near future.
slashdot.org has no need to access you.
As far as I know, Slashdot does a short port scan on your IPv4 address when you preview or post a comment in order to make sure that your machine isn't an open proxy that might be abused for vandalism. That's why your first preview of the day from a given machine is so slow: it has to wait for the connections to time out.
You use IPv6 in all the cases where you wanted that nice static IPv4 address before: When running peer to peer software. Setting up your small hobby server.
In other words, things that cable and phone companies don't really want customers on the residential plan doing in the first place, as explained in the terms of service.
If all your gaming friends got IPv6, playing on your private IPv6 only game server
By the time that happens in several years, you may have grown out of online gaming. Which of the current video game consoles supports IPv6?
Who on earth would want to save IPv4?
Carrier grade NAT is the dumbest idea yet. Just ditch the junk and move on.
Let's think about this shall we. there are 64K port addresses if I am not mistaken. that's effectively two quads IF you used them optimally. for inside the nat there are only 3 quads x 3 prefixs (169,192, 10). SO that gives us a little bit more than 5.2 quads. But that assumes every nat in the stack does everything perfectly.
Now you might isn't that 5.2 quads worth of addresses? No because each computer is going to be using multiple ports.
So this won't work. it's a bandaid however that will delay the inevitable probably by about a factor of I'd say 256 or so. Which is not bad. but it will require some strict use and people not needing static IPs.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Why should I have to pay *EXTRA* for the full internet, and competent support?
Because the majority of people don't see the point of paying for the full Internet, and what little competition there is between cable and DSL forces the two to cut their rates to the point where they have to offer a half-Internet package.
We in the US has enough addresses for our use. Why bother to fix something not broken? Let the rest of the world use country-wise VPN - most traffic is to US sites anyway. When was the last time you access a site in Timbaktu?
Okay, let's assume that IPv4 no longer exists...
1. Is Comcast going to give me unlimited IPv6 addresses? How will that work through my router? Do I now need to announce every device to Comcast? I REALLY like the fact that I get a single IP address, and I can port forward and use NAT as I like.
2. NAT makes for a pretty good firewall. I have Linux and Mac machines, and consumer devices, behind my current NAT router. With NAT and SPI, I have it pretty good. I really only ever use an outbound firewall to detect phone-home stuff and malware (and with Linux and Mac, surprise, surprise, there's not a lot of the latter).
Hey, I understand the need for IPv6. I guess I just don't want to lose what NAT offers.
--Jim (me)
Your IP address is a large part of being able to serve you relevant content, and more importantly relevant ads. If all of Comcast were, for example, to appear from one /24 then all of a sudden the ability of the content providers to target ads based on location would be done. And don't underestimate what the value in that is.
If you go ahead and say "Well, good, I don't like ads anyway" then realize this - content isn't free. It costs money for big ass datacenters to serve your page view. So take away the ability of the content providers to make money and they'll go away quickly. And then you won't have any content to view in the first place.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
The way CGN works is to spread multiple users across the same IP address. So forget about dyndns. Also forget about google maps, because it runs through ports like water, and TCP requires a 90-second timeout before releasing a port. Basically, CGN is a hack to cushion the blow, but it doesn't eliminate the need to switch to IPv6. You will like CGN a lot less than you like your present NAT.
A much better choice would be to go to NAT64. That way you get end-to-end connectivity for the hosts that do IPv6 (e.g., Google Maps can do IPv6 at this point) and use IPv4 ports for the hosts that haven't converted yet. Less demand on the scarce IPv4 ports means better performance for the cases where they are needed. And you get end-to-end when you really care about it--e.g., when Skyping your pal who also has NAT64.
... to provide you with IPv6
If you have
-a static IPv4, use a tunnel from he.net
-a dynamic IPv4, use 6to4 like on openWRT or Apple Airport Express
-a nated IPv4, use a teredo tunnel
Most likely your PC is already using tunnels.
Once you have done it, you will wonder what was all the commotion about.
For the office, disable IPv6 on your servers and provide IPv6 on your clients, then figure out your servers later
Franck Martin
Avonsys
ISPs are licking their chops for this. They want to roll out NAT for all default consumer grade ISP connections. It solves problems with scarcity, they profit from scarcity (want public IP? You pay extra for it), and it will jack with routing of P2P data and thus cut down on the leeches. It's a WIN-WIN-WIN for the Telco and cable companies.
If you guys think IP6 will be adopted, just wait till they find huge money in artificial scarcity of IP4 blocks. There will be no where to run and escape it! Unless you pay that premium...
Life is not for the lazy.
I see a lot of threads rejecting the idea that we should use large scale NAT to manage the transition. Those threads are making one of two, superficially contrary, mistakes: either arguing that IPv4 is fine and we don't need IPv6, or that we should move to IPv6 and drop IPv4 immediately. Both are wrong. Both miss the real issue here.
Both mistakes I outlined above amount to pretending there is no problem. There's a big problem. We're running out of IPv4 addresses. The IPv4 Internet will collapse unless that transition is managed. The real issue is that we must transition from IPv4 to IPv6, but we've delayed far, far too long for this to be handled elegantly. We should have started the transition years ago. Ideally, we should have had a transition period in which each machine had an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address, and once IPv6 was in general use, we would have phased out IPv4 as redundant. Instead, we have few IPv4 addresses left, so we have to have some sort of rationing system.
That's what's being proposed here, and whether this particular rationing system is the way to manage the transition is the relevant question.
FTP is hard to NAT because it uses 2 connections (one control, 1 data) and NAT routers are not very good at keeping track of state for BOTH connections as a single transfer, when dealing with both incoming and outgoing FTP. Also, the IP address is embedded in the command channel, and NAT packet mangling doesn't look into the command channel and modify this to suit what NAT is doing to the packets, unless you have fairly clever packet inspection going on.
That's kinda moot anyway, because FTP is broken and needs to die also (use SFTP insteaed). I'm not SIP expert, but I suspect similar issues are going on there as well. IPSEC security is weakened somewhat when traversing a NAT as well.
We can keep making firewalls and routing tables more complex (and thus, prone to programming bugs and thus security holes), or we can bite the bullet and go to a clean, flat IP address space and get away with much less complicated routing, firewalling, etc.
Adding complexity as you increase network size simply WILL NOT SCALE - never mind the fact that NAT also has practical limits which we will exceed in due course as well.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Or else DNS will have to be re-architected so that it returns not only IP's but port numbers, so when you go to www.somewhere.com, it resolves to x.y.z.w:n, and the host x.y.z.w has port n forwarded to the right server.
That's called a SRV record (RFC 2782) and is a really terrific idea that seems to have gone nowhere.
We need to just shutdown the internet for a week for maintenance, get ipv6 working properly, then activate everything again.
10 years ago I first read about the upcoming transition to ipv6. 10 years from now, I bet I'll be reading /. post about the imminent transition from ipv4 to ipv6 . Some things never change.
Mobile providers already do huge IPv4 NAT. T-Mobile is now doing IPv6 handsets with NAT64, which translate the IPv6 address on your phone to an IPv4 address to reach the IPv4 internet. IPv6 native services like Google are delivered end to end with IPv6, no NAT, no Firewall. http://groups.google.com/group/tmoipv6beta
If "we" actually were growing exponentially, running out of IPV4 addresses would be near the least of our problems.
On top of everything else, this means users cannot run servers of any sort. Even if we assume Skype can punch through double-NAT, this means any sort of peer-to-peer technology, or any attempt to host anything inside one of these ISPs and connect to it from outside (like remote desktop / ssh, a home fileserver, etc), all requires at least the coordination of one external server.
And yeah, 65536 ports won't last you long.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Comcast? will they try to push $5 /m per IP no nat on ipv6? They likey to hit you for $6-$15 per tv to rent there box. cable card also are with the $6-$8 outlet fee.
I am working on an IPv6 migration project for our group. Our solution will include:
IPv6 to IPv4 proxy servers to a Private internal IPv4 address space
Some native IPv6 support where it is easy
White listing of some IPv4 services where the above two solutions do not work
I suspect our solution is fairly typical for most Internet portals considering IPv6.
Two big issues with Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) or Large Scale NAT (LSN) that will have to be resolved are geolocation and denial of service protection.
Geo-location is the mapping of a browser's IP address to a physical location. Most of the large portals are fairly accurate about this. Although I move around from Hayward to Pleasanton and sometimes they get it right with Palo Alto. The problem with CGN is that many browsers for many different users will be NATed behind a single IP address. So if you are on the left coast you might be mapped to the Silicon Valley, if you are on the right coast it might be DC or New York, and people in the middle might be Omaha, Nebraska. As long as the ISPs hide big regions behind a single set of IP addresses, geolocation is going to have problems.
HTML 5 has a separate geolocation protocol built in, but that is going to have to wait for browser upgrades. A logical solution might be to have the ISPs map their old POPs to a single fixed IPv6 address so all traffic from Palo Alto has one IPv6 address and all the traffic from Redwood City has another IPv6 address. But this is entirely to logical and would require effort on the part of the ISPs
The other big problem is Denial Of Service protection. My company has tools to block traffic from IP addresses that are determined to be abusers of the site: to many account creation requests, to many emails sent, to many login failures, etc. With CGN this becomes a real problem. First how do you determine how many is to many. With thousands of hosts NATed behind a single address a thousand emails an hour is entirely reasonable and ten thousand an hour is not outrageous. The other problem is that when you block the IP address you block all of the customers, not just the one causing the problem. A logical solution for this would be to give each customer their own IPv6 address that they are NATed behind. This could also work well with geolocation. But again it entirely to logical and it requires work on the part of the ISPs. Without the unique per browser IP addresses DOS protection becomes a really hard problem.
RLH
"IPv6, too much, too soon" -- Someone
I am not a network specialist, but does this mean that no one will have a publicly assigned Internet-wide IP address in this interim period ? A computer would not be identifiable from its 'IP' unless there is explicit consent from the carrier. I expect this is a problem even with NATs today, but they aren't usually wide enough to cover more than one home or one organization. When a carrier is using NAT, it'd be hell to track down hackers and botnets, especially if they are across borders or are protected by privacy laws..
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
From what I understand support for IPv6 happens in the DSL modem not the customer's router. It talks IPv6 on the DSL side or probably on the DSL concentrator at the POP. Over the Ethernet port it talks IPv4 private IP address space.
Does anyone know if I am correct?
RLH
"IPv6, too much, too soon" -- Someone
It's not at all expensive or painful. In fact, it's free and can be up in 5 minutes.
Port forwarding is IMPOSSIBLE to set up if your ISP sticks you behind it's own NAT and gives you a non-routable IP address. You'd have to try to talk one of their trained chimps into escalating your call to someone who knows what NAT is to even discuss it, but it probably won't be in the corporate policy manual so all they will be able to do is say they can't help you.
XP supports IPv6, Linux has supported it for quite a while. What are you running, Windows 95?
yo, dawg, I herd you like NAT, so I put an NAT in your NAT so you can Port forward while you Port forward
Why not use Teredo? The whole purpose of it is to punch holes in NATs, and Windows 7 has it enabled by default if you don't have an IPv6 address.
While TCP would be a lot more work, a userland Teredo IPv6/UDP stack would be dead simple, and could even be integrated into the next generation p2p networks. Build them for IPv6, and no worries about the port forwarding nonsense.
Basically, yes. If you are on a carrier using NAT for their entire customer base, you don't get even one public IP address. But, tracking hackers will only be one problem (which might be able to be overcome through ISPs logging every Port Address Translation mapping they ever make - e.g. if you make an outbound connection through their NAT, that connection is assigned some unused port to act as the 'source' port for those packets. A remote server or website, if they log both the source IP address AND the source port of incoming connections, might be able to request the ISP to find out what internal address that source port was associated with at the instant of the hostile traffic).
Other problems will be a very widespread breakage of all sorts of apps that need to do any kind of communication directly to a host. I expect carrier-wide NAT will very adversely affect BitTorrent, Skype, VoIP programs (including the voice/video calling features in many popular Instant Messenging programs), direct file transfers, remote PC administration/access (things like VNC, PCAnywhere, Remote Desktop Protocol, etc).
Today, when using NAT on my home network, I can at least setup a port forward to give me some in-bound traffic capability. With Carrier-NAT, you won't control the router, so good luck getting any port forwards setup. And, oh yeah, only one computer per port on the entire ISP network can get a particular port forwarded to it (that is, act as the destination for that port number), so the carrier can't really offer port forwarding, even if they would be otherwise inclined to do it.
Carrier-level NAT is made of highly-enriched LOSE, wrapped in EPIC FAILURE.
There is only so much duct tape you can use...
Watch out for the duct tape fundamentalists, though I do agree that enough is enough. :)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
None of my IPv6-enabled proxies from my IPv4 computer can access it.
To this day, I think what will save the internet is by distancing internet access far from the Internet Protocol coupled to DNS, and rather onto something that is more like a Peer2Peer networking protocol where clients can be used to embrace and extend the network rather than rely on Internet Service Providers.
And isn't this what they are already doing in Russia?
It's what we should have done 8 years ago in a firmware flash.
Add 2 octets to the front of ipv4.
1.1.x.x.x.x = the entire current internet.
Any new addresses start at 1.2.x.x.x.x
All the way up to 254.254.254.254.254.254.
What's that? Around 250 trillion IP's?
Sure beats the 4bn we're at now.
Sure, it's not as elegant as IPv6, and it has all the problems of IPv4, but shit, we would have another 50 years or more to play with and no dodgy NAT solutions.
The best thing is, every device ever made could have had a relatively straight forward firmware flash.
It's a classic chicken and egg problem: Everyone realizes that making the change sooner rather than later would be cheaper -- as we wait, the total estimated costs keep rising and rising. The problem is that for an individual actor this is not true: making the change before others is not cheaper, in fact it's probably more expensive.
The end result is that everyone waits and waits until the pain of IPv4 is totally unbearable. Ungodly amounts of money will be spent in stop gaps and workarounds because for the individual companies that is still the economically smart thing to do.
Absolutely. I don't understand why do dual-stack and NAT44 instead of giving customers IPv6 and NAT64.
I assume this is because the problem isn't just all those web servers on IPv4 addresses, but a significant number of end user applications that are not IPv6 aware. Unfortunately, if we allow them to avoid upgrading with NAT44 then we can confidently predict that apps won't get updated and you'll never be able to switch it off. It's human nature not to fix the problem until forced to.
Just accept that IPv6 is happening already.
This has been in the making for a decade now.
IPv6 also has many excellent improvements over IPv4
IPv4 space IS finite, and WILL begin to run out sometime next year.
This article reminded me to go look for a good table of international "IPv6" readyness, because I expect a lot of fail, but what I found is even worse than I expected.
Check this out: IPv6 Status Survey
Un.. fucking.. believable. These aren't penny-pinching private organisations with no interest in advancing technology, these are universities, the organisations that have traditionally been at the forefront of IT. Think about the first campus networks and the internet itself, which was primarily first deployed by the education and military sectors.
The status of IPv6 at these shapers of minds, these thinkers and inventors?
Fail.. fail.. fail.. fail.. fail.. mostly fail.. fail.. fail.. fail.. almost pass.. fail.. fail.. fail.
My entire country has one university on IPv6. Just one. And that's for their main website only, their email isn't IPv6 yet.
nat is here to stay . Firewalls, load balancers, port forwarding ,internal and external networks ,internal and external dns are all permanent features . ipv6 and ipv4 . Ip routing is dead long live the port forward . The internet has been found to be insecure . Anyone who thinks ipv6 will bring back routing is a fool .
Deleted
http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7011357/
Most ISP's in Russia already only give you "gray" (i.e. NATted) IP address. "White" one (i.e. the one from global IP space) usually costs extra, about $5/month.
Most users don't seem to care, but for advanced guys that's a bummer.
As far as I know that would be illegal around here where I live.
Consider the following language from a hypothetical acceptable use policy: "Occasionally, criminals attempt to vandalize discussions on the Service by relaying messages through computers whose security has been compromised. We reserve the right to take reasonable network security measures to protect the Service from vandalism. These measures include but are not limited to probing for common backdoors on computers posting a comment." Where do you live that considers such a condition to be unconscionable?
A Mesh Network of RDF-encompassed tranceivers that bypass the mesh by line-of-sight geography would make more sense.
All your complications listed for such a thing to not be usable is closing ever nearer. It's as though you think networking is about a random access of data constantly being exchanged without any anticipation of what next could be requested. I wonder how Cell Phone towers work, and think maybe a Peer2Peer network of mobile Cell Phone towers might be just what we need to dedicate.
An complete IPv6 to IPv4 translator is hard! Not impossible but very hard. It is like NAT but where you need to have special code for many protocols. (A couple of good examples: FTP, bittorrent.) It is easy to get a few supported but then someone complains that their software stopped working. It is a maintenance nightmare for nothing. I started to write one and soon ran into a ton of special cases. I decided my time would be better spent somewhere else.
A much better approach would be for servers to advertise on both IPv4 and IPv6. Common guys and gals, it isn't that hard. Windows, Unix and OSX have all had dual IPv4 and IPv6 stacks for a quite a while now. Just get your provider to give you a subnet and start cracking. You would be amazed at how liberating it feels to have a /40, or whatever your provider gives you, all to your self to do whatever you want. (Your provider doesn't do IPv6 yet? Switch providers. No really. You wouldn't passively tolerate a store refusing to sell you a product so why tolerate your provider not doing IPv6. All provider-grade equipment sold over the last 5 years is IPv6 capable. They just need to get their act together and you can help by putting on the pressure.) You'll find many things are much easier with IPv6. In short, dual homing your servers is the proper thing to do since there are many more clients than servers. Don't be lazy. Don't tolerate your provider being lazy.
-anon
Ok, maybe I'm late to this debate, but I have no problem w/ NAT as it stands or IPv4 for that matter. I've done a very little bit of research into IPv6 and not sure that I'm sold on the whole idea yet. I understand that we are quickly running out of IPv4 addresses, but I don't see why ISP's haven't used this concept of large scale NAT before. I understand that it would have to be tested and rolled out on a small scale but it is doable.
I've been in the IT industry for over 10 years and have used NAT WITH SPI Firewalls for as long as I can remember. I have never had any trouble coming w/ enough NAT/PAT addresses to suit the needs of my network/users. I've run across the problem of the occasional hotel having the same local subnet and the conflicts that it causes w/ VPN users, but that's few and far between. I like only having a select amount of IP's viewable to the outside world. I don't like the idea of having every single device on my network w/ a publicly routable, globally viewable IP. This to me seems inherently BAD and DANGEROUS! And yes I know that make these miraculous things called firewalls, but I'm fine w/ my current setup.
So with all of that being said, someone tell me why I'm wrong and send me some links so I can enlighten myself.
specifically, the broken window fallacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why should we use large scale NAT to save a technology which is deprecated? IPv6 is better suited for P2P use for everyone. While some people NAT can be used as a security thingy and it supports your privacy, this is not so true as they assume.
a) In NAT packages are switched between networks via special rules. The machines behind the router are therefore not directly visible via an IP address. But the router can be hacked and then a appropriate tunnel can be used to access internal machines. In IPv6 you can use firewall rules to realize the same setup. And you have the same problems with them.
b) On the net your machine is not directly visible and therefore no one can track you. This is true to some extend. But the IP of your gateway is visible and that is sufficient in most cases. Also you can be identified by the content of you data. Governments and secret services can always infiltrate the gateway and see which machine is the origin of the communication. And "Intellectual Property" organisations can do so through the government.
On the downside you cannot use P2P communication in its best ways. Like in Skype you need a central hub for the dispatching (at the beginning) or a set of P2P-rules which are dynamically activated on your home router. However on large NAT you would need such bridging stuff also at these large exchange hubs. These bridging technologies use ports on routers. Therefore massive use of P2P technologies in conjunction with bridging technologies relay on ports. There are only a few ports available as this is 16 bit. Therefore it can result in a port shortage in these network bridging hubs.
Therefore a clear cut, a step away from IPv4 is in order. And please do not try to save IPv4. IPv4 might have been enough for the US, but it is not sufficient for all of us.
SIP is more of an addressbook server, not the target location you're connecting to. I don't really see this going away. SFTP works because the target machine is one and the same and you know exactly who and where you're connecting to. You can't do that with SIP, because you're asking SIP, "I want to call X" and SIP will reply, "You can call via the Internet Protocol addresses X, Y, Z on protocols P, Q using codecs T, G, D"
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
He's probably referring to SIP carrying the source IP address in the Transport payload (higher level) as well as the IP layer. So if a SIP stream goes through NAT, the router must be able to modify the IP layer and the application layer.
I don't know about FTP, maybe it does something similar.
But he's missing big pieces of his puzzle if he thinks more NAT and re-writing/trashing several established protocols is a good thing.
Hey, fellow AC. NAT was the problem all along. It might seem like a good thing, but that's because a lot of people you don't know about worked very hard to make everything work through it.
The fact that you could plug in your computer and everything just worked (TM) is not a reason to keep NAT.
Skin is better than bandaids.
Written law does not override a private party's right not to provide a service. If the legal department discovers a written law in some country against taking reasonable measures to secure a server, the server administrator will set up IP geolocation to replace the comment box with a link to the relevant statute for viewers in that country.
I like the way you think. I was rather kidding with the ipv6porn link, even though pr0n does drive a lot of tech, but if you look back to the roots of the internet it was the geeks who made things happen. Perhaps we should design new protocols built exclusively for ipv6 that fix longstanding ipv4 problems, requiring people to upgrade to ipv6 to alleviate the problem.
I guess it could be considered the Apple OS9 -> OS X route vs the Windows XP -> Vista -> 7 route, but with networking. Break the compatibility at the ground-level design, then code backwards support in later if you really need it.
IPv6 will be adopted as soon as ISPs realize it means they get to charge by the device instead of by the household.
> My only concerns would be towards people hosting
> services, even if they only host a gaming server.
We already have this concern with widespread dynamically-allocated addresses (via DHCP), and we already have the solution: depending on your ISP, the cost for a static IPv4 address ranges from "you just have to actually ask for it" up to a few bucks a month. I don't see any reason why that should change, just because the default setup is a non-public address instead of a dynamic public one.
The whole thing is a non-issue. There are *always* going to be more available public IPv4 addresses than are actually needed. The only reason unallocated ones are running short now is because they were given out pretty much for *free*, which creates artificial scarcity. Public IPv4 addresses will be very affordable for the forseeable future, but they won't be completely free of charge for much longer, because anything free gets snapped up by people who don't actually have any real use for it.
IPv6 would eventually run into this as well, because people would be like, "Hey, I can have my own personal "Class AA" range of network addresses, whatever that means? Sure, give me the biggest size available! Why not? I mean, I know I only have the one computer and the one handheld device to network together, but so what? Give me a full-sized range for me, and another full-sized range for my nickname-alias here, in case I want to be a sock puppet!" Any finite resource that you give out for free is going to run out eventually. Start charging ten or fifteen bucks per address per year, and suddenly a lot of people who don't actually have any real use for a public address decide they can live with NAT.
The problem will solve itself.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.