So I was looking into getting port forwarding set up and I realized just how closed-off the internet has gotten since the early days. It’s concerning. It used to be you would buy your own router and connect it to the internet, and that router would control port-forwarding and what-have-you.

Now, your ISP provides your router, which runs their firmware, which (in my case) doesn’t even have the option to enable port forwarding.

It gets worse - because ISPs are choosing NATs over IPv6, so even if you install a custom firmware on your router without it getting blacklisted by your ISP, you still can’t expose your server to the internet because the NAT refuses to forward traffic your way. They even devise special NAT schemes like symmetric NAT to thwart hole punching.

Basically this all means that I have to purchase my web hosting separately. Or relay all the traffic through an unnecessary third party, introducing a point of failure.

It’s frustrating.

I like to control my stuff. I don’t like to depend on other people or be in a position where I have to trust someone not to fuck with my shit. Like, if the only thing outside my apartment that mattered to my website was a DNS record, I’d be really happy with that.

Edit: TIL ISPs in the US don’t have NATs

Edit 2: OMG so much advice. My knowledge about computers is SO clearly outdated, I have a lot of things to read up on.

Edit 3: There’s definitely a CGNAT involved since the WAN ip in the router config is not the same as the one I get when I use a website that echos my IP address. Far as I can tell my devices don’t get unique IPv6 addresses either. (funnily enough, if I check my IP address on my phone using roaming data, there’s no IPv6 address at all). It’s a router/modem combo, at least I think since there’s only one device in my apartment (maybe there’s a modem managing the whole complex or something?). And it doesn’t have a bridge mode, except for OTT. Might try plugging my own router into it, but it feels like a waste of time and money from what I’m seeing. Probably best to just host services over a VPN or smth.

Edit 4: Devices do get unique IPv6 addresses, but it’s moot since I can’t do anything but ping them. I guess it wouldn’t be port forwarding but something else that I would have to do that my router doesn’t support

  • @TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22•1 year ago

    It gets worse - because ISPs are choosing NATs over IPv6,

    Yes, because they’re mostly pieces of shit, technically inept and unable to properly deploy IPv6 at a large scale.

    Either way IPv6 doesn’t fix everything as you’ll still need a real IPv4 to access a large part of the internet or some translation (MAP-T/MAP-E). Even if your ISP provided dual stack with a real public IPv6 + CGNAT / MAP-T IPv4 it would still be annoying as you wouldn’t be able to do port forwarding on the IPv4 and won’t be able to access your self-hosted services from a LOT of networks that are IPv4 only.

    There are two versions of MAP – translated (MAP-T) and encapsulated (MAP-E). In MAP-E IPv4 traffic is encapsulated into IPv6 using a v6 header before it is sent over the v6 network. At the network operator’s boundary router, the IPv6 header is then stripped, and the IPv4 traffic is forwarded to the v4 Internet. In MAP-T, the IPv4 packet header is mapped to the IPv6 header and back. The difference between the two options is evident in their names. MAP-E uses IPv6 to encapsulate and de-encapsulate IPv4 traffic, whereas MAP-T uses NAT64 to translate IPv4 to IPv6 and back.