Comment by epcoa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epcoa | Hacker News Reader

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I’m confused, are you complaining about ISP CGNAT or NAT in general? Did your ISP assign you a public IPv4 or not? If the former then you are lucky, that is a relative luxury.

> Even after learning about how NAT works, I had no way to work around it, as my ISP blocked the router's web interface and I was unable to do port forwarding.

Well this is Hacker News, you replace the router with your own.

I have yet to encounter a residential wireline ISP in the US or Europe where using your own router is not a possibility. Even those that implemented 802.1x or similar I have been able to either deal with directly or work around. Not saying there don’t exist counterexamples but I would assume using an alternative router +/- MITM the old one would have been viable.

Of course if the ISP was firewalling (likely) then you have a different problem.

This isn’t really a NAT issue. More of a specific ISP policy issue. (NAT and ipv4 have nothing to do with it, they can just as easily port block inbound 80/443 on ipv6.)

The argument boils down to: My ISP locked down the admin page on my rented router ergo NAT is evil. It’s not terribly sensible.

This is my take as well, we would not have any ip space if every machine had a public ipv4 address - this is kind of a silly argument to make, nat’s provide a ton of usefulness.

As a kid I didn’t get it either but would port forward, run a vpn server, reverse proxy, and so on. It was a good learning experience trying to get my friends to install vpn clients!

> nat’s provide a ton of usefulness

... to companies like IPXO that are trying to acquire, rent, and treat IPv4 addresses like speculative real estate.

> we would not have any ip space if every machine had a public ipv4 address

Right, but then ISPs and hosting providers would have to have supported ipv6 10 years ago (or even earlier) when we ran out. Customers were already demanding multiple devices on their wifi 20 years ago, and without NAT, ipv6 would have been necessary.

With NAT, you can't do p2p or self hosting. Without it, you couldn't use centralized services either.

NAT's usefulness is that it helps with IP address shortage. If there wasn't a shortage, NAT wouldn't be useful anymore.

And for those that say "but security!", firewalls are a thing, and need be no more complicated than NAT.

> Did your ISP assign you a public IPv4 or not? If the former then you are lucky, that is a relative luxury.

At least until the 10G fiber upgrade happens, Sonic has given me a static IPv4 address for a decade.

Sure. I still remember when I could order additional static IPs on residential cable internet.

That doesn’t mean most getting online today in Asia or Africa basically have a choice other than CGNAT IPv4 and IPv6 from their ISP. Your own dynamically assigned IPv4 is a relative luxury.

Do they guarantee it is static?

My current IP hasn't changed in years but I need to pony up if I want them to guarantee it forever.

Are you running any servers? I can't find it now, but I remember reading somewhere once that ISPs force IP changes more often on residential users that they detect are running servers.

I've been running a web server for the last year or so, and I still have the same IP from Comcast that I've had for years. When I was a teenager I also ran servers and had a stable IP for years. Ostensibly they say you're not allowed to run servers, but I'm guessing they'd only care if you're constantly using a significant chunk of your bandwidth.

> Do they guarantee it is static?

Yes, but it's only for grandfathered DSL.

https://help.sonic.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009880293-Static...

As a data point, the ISP I'm personally using here in Australia (Launtel, highly recommended) has static IPs as an option.

It's not the default choice (most people don't need one), but people that do need a static IP can get one.

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