Comment by TacticalCoder
17 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.
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.
> IPv4 is old, very old. But how is it broken?
It is broken for you by upstream NAT and CGNAT.
You mean it's fixed by NAT and CGNAT. Because it's works just fine for me.
> 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."
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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).
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Until a service's WAF catches your /32 because your ISP had previously handed it out to a spammer.
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