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Most users have no use for a static adress space. Those are usually business or power-user needs.
This you are classified as that. A power-user.
The reason they have no use for a static address is because applications haven't evolved to work that way. Roll back the clock 30 years, do IPv6 seriously so that everyone has static assignments by the time the Y2k problem has come and gone, and you have a very different Internet.
In fact, many applications, like VoIP and game hosting, have to go through all sorts of hoops to work around NAT.
There's pretty much no use for a normal person, just for business and power users like the person above you.
For your couple examples, nobody at home actually runs VOIP except a couple nerds just like nobody has home phones except a couple of old people. And quick game servers don't need statics, and if you are hosting something long term that would push you into the power use space.
. . . nobody at home actually runs VOIP . . .
Plenty of people used Skype and Vonage. Both were subverted because they have to assume NAT is there.
. . . quick game servers don’t need static . . .
But they do work better without NAT. That's somewhat separate from static addresses.
My old roommate and I had tons of problems back in the day when we tried to host an Internet game of C&C: Generals behind the same NAT. I couldn't connect to him. He couldn't connect to me. We could connect to each other but nobody outside could. It's a real problem that's only been "solved" because a lot of games have moved to publisher-hosted servers. Which has its own issues with longevity.
Fyi, Skype was officially killed by Microsoft on May 5th, earlier this month.
As far as I'm aware Skype does not support actual VOIP calling anymore, at least according to Microsoft and the couple forums i just skimmed through. But it's been probably 10+ years since I've actually used it or interacted with anyone who used it haha
And I was talking about static IPs, which are different. And at least in the US (in single family homes) its crazy unlikely that your router is behind any NAT. Unless you're talking about CGNAT but anything short of a dedicated fiber run or dedicated wavelength (which are not options for residential people) you will be behind a CGNAT anyways. Even if you have a public IP.
And, anecdotally. In the last 5-8 years I don't think I've had any issues with NAT when hosting games, it's just firewall rules or my public IP changed. But ymmv on that one when playing 22 year old games haha
Skype won't be supporting anything at all very soon.
What happened with Vonage is something that could happen with any kind of instant messaging, including things like Discord.
With everything directly addressable (not just static addresses, but directly addressable), an IM/VoIP service can simply connect to the recipient. No servers are necessary in between, only routers. That doesn't work with NAT (CG or otherwise), so what you have to do is create a server that everyone connects into, and then that forwards messages to the endpoint. This is:
- More expensive to operate
- Less reliable
- Slower
- A point for NSA eavesdropping (which almost certainly happened)
This is largely invisible to end users until free services get enshittified or something goes wrong.
Yes, it's only tangentially related to static addresses, but it's all part of the package. This is not the Internet we should have had.
And at least in the US (in single family homes) its crazy unlikely that your router is behind any NAT
Your router has NAT. That's the problem. CGNAT is another problem. My C&C: Generals issues did not have CGNAT.
All routers have NAT, that's sort of their entire role. Are you maybe talking about "double NATing" where you have your router behind the ISP modem/router?
No they fucking don't, that's not what routers do. You don't know what you're talking about.
And don't fucking tell me NAT is for security, either.
That literally is though? NAT stands for Network Address Translation. It'll take you public IP and translate those packets to use your internal one.
If your computer has an address that starts with 169, 168, or 10 there is a NAT somewhere in your network.
And it's a "security thing" in the same way that asking someone's name over the phone prevents impersonation haha
Have you ever chained three Cisco 2600 routers together and then successfully ping'd clients on each end? Do you know what BGP is? OSPF? Do you know the difference between routing and routed protocols?
I know you don't, because people who do don't make the claims you're making.
Not really.
And even as a network amateur I know that its
10.0.0.0/8
172.16.0.0/12
192.168.0.0/16
and 169.254.0.0/16 is not even routable so no dice with NAT.
So someone can connect to you just with with a public IPv4 starting with 192.x.x.x
That's not the point of a router. It is one feature that most of not all now have, but it's not their primary purpose.
It would be handy for piracy to always know your friend's IP addresses. Like friend-to-friend networks like Retroshare
And having a friend-to-friend piracy network absolutely pushes you into "power user" territory lmfao
Yeah it's fucked up.
I've noticed that on my cell phone's cell connection, I can't access my home server, but I can access my cloud site. I'm guessing either XFinity blocks connections from cell IPs thinking they're spam, or my cell carrier blocks connections to home IPs thinking they're scams.
With a little more debugging I'll either change cell carriers or ISPs soon I hope. If I have to register a business maybe I'll make an LLC and run a lemonade stand or something lol.
I think you need to take the tin foil hat off mate.
IPv4 in many places has RAN OUT. No more, zilch.
Most people can get a fully functioning CGNAT address and surf the IPv4 web just fine.
Most VPS providers will give you IPv4 and IPv6 just fine.
So really the only issue is for the 10-20% of people who need to host an online service, security camera or online game system that doesn't have a server or rendezvous service.
You can get IPv6 addresses. What you can't get, in many cases, is a static IPv6 prefix assignment.
CGNAT is not fine. Its problems are simply hidden from most people. ISPs have to have more equipment that's less reliable, increases latency, and is potentially a bandwidth bottleneck.
If you have control over at least the root of your network you can totally get away with hosting in a dynamic pub ip. You just need to set up dynamicdns. There are other ways of handling this specific issue too. You can always go to a colocation and set up a server there if you want. You could also create your own reverse proxy tunnel in a place that is public then forward it. There are lots of work arounds really. Yeah, it sucks that American ISPs generally don’t support ipv6 but there are totally ways to work around it all.
What really gets me up in arms is when they advertise gigabit connections or 500mb speeds only to limit upload to 20mb/s. That is where they are actively inhibiting self hosting communities.
Even in an ideal DNS setup, you're probably going to have downtimes whenever your dynamic IP changes. If only because some ISPs even force-disconnect you after a while to change your address.
I mean I’ll be real. Sure in some circumstances that could be an annoyance for 15 seconds for some software that might rely on a session whenever your ip changes like once a month if that. A rotating ip is probably one of the easiest things to work around amongst the plethora of challenges that ISPs present for those who want to self host.
I mean just take a look at what is involved if you are in a situation where cg-nat is implemented. You legitimately have no control over the root of your network at that point. I have that issue in particular with what is essentially a mobile hotspot as my failover for when my fiber fails. That being said I had to architect it in a way that took that took cg-nat into consideration. If I hadn’t then when fiber fails it would take down my services as a whole anyway.
My point is that those challenges have workarounds, you can solve those issues relatively easily and they even present a level of security. Where it is actively malicious is with restrictions to capacity such as upload limits in which they to a degree lie about their speeds and capacity. The terms of service stuff is just flat out awful too.
Some ISPs require changes ever 24 hours and will disconnect you if needed. Also, if you set DNS to cache such a short amount of time that you can react to that in 5 minutes, you will incur way more DNS traffic which can become a problem when your site is busier. Also, even if your DNS TTL is set to a super short value, a web search suggests to me in practice there will likely be downstream clients and networks that ignore it and won't really update in such a short time frame.
What ISP are you referring to? I have genuinely never heard of an isp that takes 24 hours to rotate your IP. Also utilizing dynamicdns is not going to incur more dns traffic? Dynamic DNS updates your dns provider from a system on your local network that your pub ip has changed then your provider will start sending traffic to the new ip. Propagation used to take a while but I haven’t experienced propagation wait times of over 10 minutes in years. This all being said dynamic DNS isn’t exactly the most elegant solution. It is just one of the simplest that I mentioned. There are significantly better options overall that completely take the requirement of a static pubip completely out of the equation and can be built using all free open source tools relatively easily.
It causes way more traffic for the DNS server to use a shorter TTL, so yes, it does incur more DNS traffic. In Germany some providers will disconnect you regularly if you stay connected for too long.
They don't care about "capitalist cloud services", they just care about money. If they can charge you a premium for more advanced features (they can) then they will.
You're not wrong. And the line between evil and laziness here is too messy for me to sort out. We got into this mess because the internet was originally designed as a communication tool between business, university, and government. Specifically, Bell Labs connecting universities as part of the military project DARPA. Since they were connecting dozens of sites, the 4 billion addresses (2^32) seemed like plenty.
Skipping over dialup and forward to early broadband, the issue of the number of addresses problem was 'solved' by a clever firewall technique network address translation (NAT). It was adversited as a security feature, but it allowed ISPs to give one public IP per customer. This standardized things for them - they give you one IP and you multiplex it as you wish. However, since the average customer wanted a turnkey solution, the ISPs would then toss in the modem as a rental. (Also, as enshitification hit this rental modem started getting more user hostile.)
But at this point ISPs are engorged and lazy and redoing everything is a chore, so they got one IPv6 space for everyone, and set up their IPv6 servers to assign chucks of that space based on your assigned IPv4 address. Easy-peasy! Now none of their other management or billing systems have to change! Of course, now your v6 space moves anytime your v4 space does but -they always have those business accounts to sell you …
A diamond in the rough: When I was younger, working at a data center and IPv6 was new, I found this gem coupled with IPv6 world day (via Reddit): https://tunnelbroker.net/
Hurricane Electric was/is happy to give you a free static IPv6 /48 prefix, and you could tunnel your home connection directly to this (like a site to site VPN). Their catch is if you start pushing significant traffic you'll have to pay market rates. But if your goal is to add a free static IPv6 frontend to your home network, this has been here the whole time.
Similarly, I've read Cloudflare's Terms of Service [privacy policy, et al.] and they're fairly tame compared to many. I'm also partial to their WARP technology. The idea is the end user's traffic is encrypted and sent to any of Cloudflare's servers and from there they can then bounce to anywhere in the world (a handy trick if you need to get around a great firewall or other tools of censorship). If your home lab uses Cloudflare's tunnel, and your phones use WARP, the only thing a third party can see it that you're using the largest CDN in the world - which is sorta a 'well, duh' statement. Cloudflare's schtick is they don't need limits - they can flood you home connection and it wouldn't be a blip on their radar. However, they need to run variations of these technologies to operate their primary business. So making a copy for you to use is almost trivial. (And if you go viral and suddenly need a CDN, I'm sure they can sell you some)
Tl;dr: you're not wrong, but the desert has water in it, if you know where to look.
There are some good ISPs out there. My ISP in Australia (Leaptel) gives me the option to enable static IPv6 /48 for free.
No german ISP that i know of does this, it's awful. One doesn't even offer reverse IP ptr entries whatsoever, even if you had a static IP.
You know, what's kind of encouraging is that I posted something similar to this complaint on reddit, and 100% of the responses were corporate apologia how it would apparently be so much work and so much more expensive to provide a static instead of a dynamic IP, or how routing through VPSes is so much better anyway. I hadn't realized the reddit to lemmy brain drain was so bad, which seems good for decentralized morally good hosting.
Cries in American 🇺🇸😿
Asymmetric bandwidth is literally designed to ensure you remain a consumer and is actively inhibiting the collaborative, communal web utopia we were told was going to be the future.
Huh????
Honestly I don't see your problem, a nuance? Sure! An unsolvable problem? For sure not.
If you want to have your system reachable from the Wan then you will need a domain name. If you have a domain name then it is needed to be resolved by a dns server.
If there is a dns resolver then you would able to update it dynamically every time your ip changes.
True that the time alive of the dns records must be low enough to ensure that an ip change does not let your system down for an unacceptable amount of time.
<<<< has ipv4 static ip to my house. I do pay a small premium though. Like $15 bucks.
$5 for mine
It's a pain but also it's no surprise that DNS and ipv6 are premium when ipv4 and dynamic IP works so well for 99% of us. Even if you wanna host something publicly there are totally free services and software tools to cover most if not all caveats of not using ipv6 (for now).
I have selfhosted for years and only paid for a domain name recently.
If you only care about having a static IPv6 address take a look at TunnelBroker by Hurricane Electric. They give you free /48 IPv6 blocks tunnelled through their network. Words of warning though: 1) some ISPs block using this service (prevent the tunnel from working), 2) in my experience I’ve seen high latency due to weird routing, 3) those IPs ending up on blocklists due to abuse and 4) the tunnel is unencrypted so traffic between you and Hurricane Electric is trivially intercepted, though if that was a problem in the first place then you wouldn’t be hosting from your home network anyway so this is mostly moot.
My dynamic IPv6 prefix hasn't changed in a couple of years. It only changed because I reset the router config and that changed my DUID. That's good enough for everything I host. I don't even bother with dynamic DNS anymore.
I wouldn't bother with trying to host an email server from a residential connection though. Even if you can get your ISP to open port 25 for you, many email servers won't accept mail from residential IP addresses.
IPv6 costs money to implement so it doesn't happen without good reason.
For ISPs you need many options so that one company can't take all the business. In my area competition is steep so fiber is cheap. In rural areas I'm personally interested in community or small ISPs. Surely some people could get together and make something better.
rural ISPs still need a connection to the greater internet, what options are there when the closest non-shitty option is hundreds of miles away?
Community run ISPs
Get some people together and start an ISP
If you’re looking for sympathy, you got it. Fuck the state.
If you’re looking for solutions, use a cheap $5/mo VPS that exists purely as your gateway host. Run everything you want on your home machines, then tunnel the traffic to your gateway and reverse-proxy it there. Your data stays in your hands, you can spin up and expose new services publicly in a matter of minutes, AND your home IP isn’t vulnerable to doxxing or DoS.
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this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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