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Honest question. Why did this happen? I mean how could it happen that such a basic utility as the router was developed with such fundamental design flaws that

Honest question. Why did this happen? I mean how could it happen that such a basic utility as the router was developed with such fundamental design flaws that hosting a webserver at home is above the skills of 99% of people? There’s a router in every home anywhere now, so this is a fact we’ll have to deal with for decades. I’m pretty young so i was not around at the time. How did it come about?

Gigachad 4y ago
It was NAT. We ran out of v4 addresses and self hosting / p2p became much harder. And now many iot devices depend on Nat existing as some kind of security measure. But largely no one cares because you wouldn’t want to host any real website at home anyway. It’s extremely cheap and reliable to just rent a VPS.
- pbronez 4y ago
  So what happened with IPv6 then? Seems to me that that we solved the v4 address exhaustion problem and then just… didn’t use it? IPv6 support is mostly just a greyed out option on a buried configuration menu as far as I can tell.
  - topranks 4y ago
    v6 usage continues to grow on cellular and broadband networks. So lots of consumers now have it. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html I would argue many aspects of the protocol’s design made it difficult to implement, for both vendors and networks. A simple “same protocol, larger address field” and more focus on backwards compatibility probably would have fared better. Either way it doesn’t completely solve the problem mentioned above. You need a firewall to block inbound connections to things on your LAN. So to do p2p you need a way to add rules to allow the traffic you want in. So it either remains too complex for the average person to do manually, or you run something like uPNP. But that can have its own security considerations. v6 does remove some of the complexities for trying to run services from private address space behind NAT though. So it’s an improvement.
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    I live in a major city (in the EU) and I just got v6 support late last year, as a beta. Most other people still don’t have it. Yet still, WSL doesn’t support v6… we have a long way to go before ipv6 can be a default option for hosting.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  It's also a really poor idea from a security point of view. Businesses put web servers in DMZs for that reason to if they still host them on prem.

Gigachad 4y ago

It was NAT. We ran out of v4 addresses and self hosting / p2p became much harder. And now many iot devices depend on Nat existing as some kind of security measure. But largely no one cares because you wouldn’t want to host any real website at home anyway. It’s extremely cheap and reliable to just rent a VPS.

pbronez 4y ago
So what happened with IPv6 then? Seems to me that that we solved the v4 address exhaustion problem and then just… didn’t use it? IPv6 support is mostly just a greyed out option on a buried configuration menu as far as I can tell.
- topranks 4y ago
  v6 usage continues to grow on cellular and broadband networks. So lots of consumers now have it. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html I would argue many aspects of the protocol’s design made it difficult to implement, for both vendors and networks. A simple “same protocol, larger address field” and more focus on backwards compatibility probably would have fared better. Either way it doesn’t completely solve the problem mentioned above. You need a firewall to block inbound connections to things on your LAN. So to do p2p you need a way to add rules to allow the traffic you want in. So it either remains too complex for the average person to do manually, or you run something like uPNP. But that can have its own security considerations. v6 does remove some of the complexities for trying to run services from private address space behind NAT though. So it’s an improvement.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  I live in a major city (in the EU) and I just got v6 support late last year, as a beta. Most other people still don’t have it. Yet still, WSL doesn’t support v6… we have a long way to go before ipv6 can be a default option for hosting.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
It's also a really poor idea from a security point of view. Businesses put web servers in DMZs for that reason to if they still host them on prem.