5 ms·

As a sysadmin, any time I read some variation of; "At some point even data centers may become a thing of the past.", I know they don't know what they are talkin

As a sysadmin, any time I read some variation of; "At some point even data centers may become a thing of the past.", I know they don't know what they are talking about. As a matter of fact it has provided much joy through laughter (followed by required sysadmin scotch) at the show "Silicon Valley" for obviously parodying the issue. Datacenters aren't going anywhere, and this strange fascination in hipster-hackers with instant uber-decentralization-pushes concerns me because it ignores some of the more real (and fixable) issues at hand like dns centralization in favor of magical "p2p(+blockchain) will save us all" thinking not backed by much real world practical implementation. Don't get me wrong, I'm a darknet, meshnet supporter. I love decentralization. That said, I support the establishment of the infrastructure required to support it independent of end-user devices, and I think for security and other purposes it's at least possible they should remain separate, and devs shouldn't assume so much right to cpu-cycles. So in essence the topology I think that is preferable would be properly called decentralized-distributed. Of course thats part of the reason I support things that go against that common grain, such as ipv6nat.

jfoutz 9y ago
> I support things that go against that common grain, such as ipv6nat. > ipv6nat Die in a fire while stung to death by scorpions and your eyes are eaten by spiders. No. that is too much. You are my fellow human, i don't wish that on anyone. > ipv6nat Still. I hope you have to poop while stuck in a meeting.
- ianai 9y ago
  What am I missing?
  - FeepingCreature 9y ago
    One of the hopes for IPv6 was that it'd deliver us from IP address scarcity and hence the need for NAT and all the associated difficulty of NAT traversal.
    - hardwaresofton 9y ago
      This is what I thought -- why would you neet Network Address Translation (NAT) when the address space is big enough to have everyone have an individual address? No need to traverse a router, it just becomes another hop in the chain.
      - dagw 9y ago
        Another positive (unintended) consequence of needing NAT everywhere is that it means most devices end up behind some sort of firewall by default.
  - jfoutz 9y ago
    Debugging nat. it's, well, unpleasant. ipv6 has a whole lot more address space than ipv4. it obviates the need for nat. i think the standard deal is a /64 for your router. you can roll addresses every half hour forever, if you want to. nat is just a bunch of glued together heuristics about how things should work. it's not fun to debug. i mean, you have 2^32 internets worth of space to assign to machines. everything is so much simpler without nat. i dunno. maybe i'm an idiot. maybe nat is super cool, and i'm just jaded. imho it makes things very difficult. but i'll defer to the majority. whether i want to or not.
- sudhirj 9y ago
  Explain? Only reason I can think of why this would be funny is that under IPv6 everything could have a dedicated IP, making the NAT useless. No other reason to have NATs, though? Single IP exposure, security, that kind of thing?
  - hardwaresofton 9y ago
    FeepingCreature mentioned this: > One of the hopes for IPv6 was that it'd deliver us from IP address scarcity and hence the need for NAT and all the associated difficulty of NAT traversal. My response: > This is what I thought -- why would you neet Network Address Translation (NAT) when the address space is big enough to have everyone have an individual address? No need to traverse a router, it just becomes another hop in the chain.
    - skgoa 9y ago
      Because you might not want to expose your internal addresses to the wider internet for a variety of reasons. Security, variability, compatibility with IPv4 clients/subnets etc.
      - Piskvorrr 9y ago
        NAT is not a security mechanism, nor is it a necessary part of routing ("variability"). At the very best, it's a band-aid - mostly cosmetic and provides psychological comfort.
        dx034 9y ago
        But it provides some privacy. Identifying users solely by IP doesn't work well with ipv4. Even if you have a subnet in ipv6, you're still the only one using it.
        Piskvorrr 9y ago
        Band-aid again. Identifying users by IP was never a reliable technique; and with most services, I'm still the only human using my public IPv4 address, NAT or no NAT. If worried about privacy, you have a whole raft of identifying mechanisms to cope with before the IP address as an identifier even appears on the horizon, and there are tools to obfuscate your source address; NATing it away only makes things more complicated without a commensurate increase in privacy (worse, provides a false sense thereof).
- samtoday 9y ago
  I genuinely don't understand why you would want ipv6nat. It seems like a bog-standard firewall; but instead of being able to configure rules about incoming traffic, everything is blocked and you are stuck with that. Maybe somebody who knows more about this topic could explain it?
- etaioinshrdlu 9y ago
  What should people do if they want to connect multiple clients to the Internet and they are only given 1 IPv6 address? The answer is not, just be given more IPv6 addresses. People who can benefit from ipv6nat probably don't have much of a choice. It's a technical tool. Imagine getting just one IPv6 address to your LTE phone and wanting to share it with a room full of devices.
  - hossbeast 9y ago
    Maybe your phone can be assigned a block.
    - etaioinshrdlu 9y ago
      Just like I don't get 100 IPv4 addresses on my phone, I don't get a block of IPv6 addresses. There is nothing I can do about it. IPv6 changes nothing in that regard, effectively.
      - X-Istence 9y ago
        Except that with IPv6, your telco could delegate you an entire /64, or potentially less and turn your phone into just another router in the network. Just asked my friend who is on Verizon, when he is tethered to his phone his laptop/computer gets a full globally unique IPv6 address, every device that is tethered gets one. So it already exists.
      - zrm 9y ago
        > Just like I don't get 100 IPv4 addresses on my phone, I don't get a block of IPv6 addresses. There is nothing I can do about it. Sure you can. Do the thing the people whose ISPs give them zero IPv6 addresses do -- use a tunnel broker. Or a VPN provider that gives you a real IPv6 address block.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  Isn't this a security thing? I'm not anything close to a security expert, but I always understood that it was best not to have your personal computer exposed directly to the Internet. Not to mention just having control over my own network. Also, my ISP only gave me one ipv6 address. I'm OK with that.
  - X-Istence 9y ago
    Your ISP likely gave you a single IP address for your router, and will happily also give you a /64 or larger for your internal network.
  - tokenizerrr 9y ago
    You can have a firewall without NAT
- arca_vorago 9y ago
  It's not that bad, I promise. If one really takes the time to examine the reasoning given for the hate, one might find those reasons wanting. Have you had to deal with it directly yourself and found something wrong?
  - jfoutz 9y ago
    how do you cope with something like gossip in consul when you have a host <-> nat <-> internet <-> nat <-> host setup? the last time i tried, gossip would send a udp packet from something other than port 8302, so left to right would work ok, but nat would assume some state there, and treat right to left as a reply, rather than fresh connection, and stuff would get lost. Although, it has been a couple of years and i'm probably misremembering the details. I do remember it being hard to debug.
WillReplyfFood 9y ago
I come from less a practical side to this, more from a persons side who is reading history books. Every page yells, at you "decentralize" prevent destruction, prevent information control, prevent fortress paranoia and pride by delusions.

jfoutz 9y ago

> I support things that go against that common grain, such as ipv6nat. > ipv6nat Die in a fire while stung to death by scorpions and your eyes are eaten by spiders. No. that is too much. You are my fellow human, i don't wish that on anyone. > ipv6nat Still. I hope you have to poop while stuck in a meeting.

ianai 9y ago
What am I missing?
- FeepingCreature 9y ago
  One of the hopes for IPv6 was that it'd deliver us from IP address scarcity and hence the need for NAT and all the associated difficulty of NAT traversal.
  - hardwaresofton 9y ago
    This is what I thought -- why would you neet Network Address Translation (NAT) when the address space is big enough to have everyone have an individual address? No need to traverse a router, it just becomes another hop in the chain.
    - dagw 9y ago
      Another positive (unintended) consequence of needing NAT everywhere is that it means most devices end up behind some sort of firewall by default.
- jfoutz 9y ago
  Debugging nat. it's, well, unpleasant. ipv6 has a whole lot more address space than ipv4. it obviates the need for nat. i think the standard deal is a /64 for your router. you can roll addresses every half hour forever, if you want to. nat is just a bunch of glued together heuristics about how things should work. it's not fun to debug. i mean, you have 2^32 internets worth of space to assign to machines. everything is so much simpler without nat. i dunno. maybe i'm an idiot. maybe nat is super cool, and i'm just jaded. imho it makes things very difficult. but i'll defer to the majority. whether i want to or not.
sudhirj 9y ago
Explain? Only reason I can think of why this would be funny is that under IPv6 everything could have a dedicated IP, making the NAT useless. No other reason to have NATs, though? Single IP exposure, security, that kind of thing?
- hardwaresofton 9y ago
  FeepingCreature mentioned this: > One of the hopes for IPv6 was that it'd deliver us from IP address scarcity and hence the need for NAT and all the associated difficulty of NAT traversal. My response: > This is what I thought -- why would you neet Network Address Translation (NAT) when the address space is big enough to have everyone have an individual address? No need to traverse a router, it just becomes another hop in the chain.
  - skgoa 9y ago
    Because you might not want to expose your internal addresses to the wider internet for a variety of reasons. Security, variability, compatibility with IPv4 clients/subnets etc.
    - Piskvorrr 9y ago
      NAT is not a security mechanism, nor is it a necessary part of routing ("variability"). At the very best, it's a band-aid - mostly cosmetic and provides psychological comfort.
      - dx034 9y ago
        But it provides some privacy. Identifying users solely by IP doesn't work well with ipv4. Even if you have a subnet in ipv6, you're still the only one using it.
        Piskvorrr 9y ago
        Band-aid again. Identifying users by IP was never a reliable technique; and with most services, I'm still the only human using my public IPv4 address, NAT or no NAT. If worried about privacy, you have a whole raft of identifying mechanisms to cope with before the IP address as an identifier even appears on the horizon, and there are tools to obfuscate your source address; NATing it away only makes things more complicated without a commensurate increase in privacy (worse, provides a false sense thereof).
samtoday 9y ago
I genuinely don't understand why you would want ipv6nat. It seems like a bog-standard firewall; but instead of being able to configure rules about incoming traffic, everything is blocked and you are stuck with that. Maybe somebody who knows more about this topic could explain it?
etaioinshrdlu 9y ago
What should people do if they want to connect multiple clients to the Internet and they are only given 1 IPv6 address? The answer is not, just be given more IPv6 addresses. People who can benefit from ipv6nat probably don't have much of a choice. It's a technical tool. Imagine getting just one IPv6 address to your LTE phone and wanting to share it with a room full of devices.
- hossbeast 9y ago
  Maybe your phone can be assigned a block.
  - etaioinshrdlu 9y ago
    Just like I don't get 100 IPv4 addresses on my phone, I don't get a block of IPv6 addresses. There is nothing I can do about it. IPv6 changes nothing in that regard, effectively.
    - X-Istence 9y ago
      Except that with IPv6, your telco could delegate you an entire /64, or potentially less and turn your phone into just another router in the network. Just asked my friend who is on Verizon, when he is tethered to his phone his laptop/computer gets a full globally unique IPv6 address, every device that is tethered gets one. So it already exists.
    - zrm 9y ago
      > Just like I don't get 100 IPv4 addresses on my phone, I don't get a block of IPv6 addresses. There is nothing I can do about it. Sure you can. Do the thing the people whose ISPs give them zero IPv6 addresses do -- use a tunnel broker. Or a VPN provider that gives you a real IPv6 address block.
nerdponx 9y ago
Isn't this a security thing? I'm not anything close to a security expert, but I always understood that it was best not to have your personal computer exposed directly to the Internet. Not to mention just having control over my own network. Also, my ISP only gave me one ipv6 address. I'm OK with that.
- X-Istence 9y ago
  Your ISP likely gave you a single IP address for your router, and will happily also give you a /64 or larger for your internal network.
- tokenizerrr 9y ago
  You can have a firewall without NAT
arca_vorago 9y ago
It's not that bad, I promise. If one really takes the time to examine the reasoning given for the hate, one might find those reasons wanting. Have you had to deal with it directly yourself and found something wrong?
- jfoutz 9y ago
  how do you cope with something like gossip in consul when you have a host <-> nat <-> internet <-> nat <-> host setup? the last time i tried, gossip would send a udp packet from something other than port 8302, so left to right would work ok, but nat would assume some state there, and treat right to left as a reply, rather than fresh connection, and stuff would get lost. Although, it has been a couple of years and i'm probably misremembering the details. I do remember it being hard to debug.

WillReplyfFood 9y ago

I come from less a practical side to this, more from a persons side who is reading history books. Every page yells, at you "decentralize" prevent destruction, prevent information control, prevent fortress paranoia and pride by delusions.