Comment by throw0101a
5 days ago
> The widespread deployment of NAT and VPNs has counter acted the market forces that were assumed to make IPv6 appealing.
Tell that to everyone who is behind CG-NAT and has issues with (e.g.) video games. Or all the (small(er)) ISPs that have to layout CapEx for translation boxes.
Honestly the games issue might be out of day. Game devs have access to great services to punch through NAT at this point.
Tech finds a way…
Which has led to every game needing a central server running, forcing centralization where p2p used to work great. Also how Skype was able to scale on a budget, something now blocked, forcing you to raise money for more ideas than before. Running a matrix(?) node should be as simple as clicking install and it's just there, next time you're with your friends, nfc tap or whatever and your servers talk to each other directly forever going forward. But nope, there always is a gatekeeper now and they need money and that poisons everything.
I don’t think VOIP was a major factor in game centralization. The big one was selling cosmetics (easily unlock able server-side in community servers), and to some extent being able to police voice chat more. Major game publishers didn’t want to be in the news about the game with the most slurs or child grooming or what not.
Central servers are useful for more than just NAT hole-punching. They’re also great as a centralized database of records and statistics as well as a host for anti-cheating services and community standards enforcement.
Peer to Peer games with no central authority would be so rife with cheating that you’d only ever want to play with friends, not strangers. That sucks!
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So we acknowledge v4 and CG-NAT are a problem but don't want to use the already available solution because game developers took it upon themselves to DEFEAT NAT :)
That just reminded me of a peer protocol I worked on a long time ago that used other hosts to try to figure out which hosts were getting translated. Kind of like a reverse TOR. If that was detected, the better peering hosts would send them each other's local and public addresses so they could start sending UDP packets to each other, because the NAT devices wouldn't expect the TCP handshake first and so while the first few rounds didn't make it through, it caused the NAT device(s) to create the table entries for itself.
Was it Hamachi that was the old IPX-over-IP tunneling? I'm fairly sure it used similar tricks. IPX-over-IP is also done on DOSBOX, which incidentally made it possible to play Master of Orion 2 with friends in other continents.
> That just reminded me of a peer protocol I worked on a long time ago that used other hosts to try to figure out which hosts were getting translated. Kind of like a reverse TOR. If that was detected, the better peering hosts would send them each other's local and public addresses so they could start sending UDP packets to each other,
Sounds similar to STUN, really.
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I can spin up a NAT puncher today without having to depend on anybody. Can't say the same for IPv6.
Nat hole punching works... most of the time. There are many edge cases and weird/broken networks which you just can't work around in standard ways. You get to see all kinds of broken setups if you work at VoIP providers. That's why everyone will use a central proxy server as the last resource - you'll mostly notice it only because of a higher ping.
Isn't CGnat due to IPv6 use on the mobiles? You could quit and say that's an IPv6 problem that didn't get solved in the IPv6 engineering
IPv6 is used on mobile networks since there aren't enough IPv4 addresses. Some of these mobile networks are so big there aren't even enough private IPv4 addresses for their CG-NAT private side to fit, leaving the only clean solution being NAT64/DNS64.
Why would CGNAT be deployed as a response to IPv6 on mobile? I don't understand the logic there. CGNAT is deployed due to a shortage of publicly routable IPv4 addresses. IPv6 was introduced due to having much larger publicly routable space.
Because the internet as a whole is ipv4. The mobiles are IPv6. The ipv4 internet does not care about any server running on any mobile device.
Thus, CG Nat was invented so that IPv6 could talk to IPv4 and get the information from it.
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