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I'm confused, how can NATs and SRV DNS labels replace a public IP address?

• jeroenhd 3y ago
  They can help people put up to 65535 services on a single IP address rather than taking up a /16 of routable space through port numbers alone. Double that if you add UDP, and triple that if you can find that many services that can use SCTP. You still need at least one IP address, but for services using hundreds of individual hosts the cost shouldn't rise too much this way.
  • flumpcakes 3y ago
    What common applications commonly support SRV? I can't load a HTTPS in a modern web browser on a non-443 port without explicitly specifying it for example.
    • jeroenhd 3y ago
      XMPP and Matrix do, at least. Office365 uses it for Lync I believe. Minecraft uses it too. Wikipedia has a short list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record For HTTPS and such protocols, where the port number is hardcoded, you'll be out of luck with plain SRV. SVCB and HTTPS records should allow for other ports to be used with modern HTTPS, though I haven't personally played around with those.
• exabrial 3y ago
  The theory is that very few companies actually need more than one ipv4 address. In fact, the overwhelming majority of internet consumers would be better served without a public address.
  • Dagger2 3y ago
    That's not really true. Most people, companies and consumers alike, have networks of more than one machine and they actually really want those networks to be part of the Internet rather than being separate and using a proxy. You can't do that without public address space. You can try to fake it with NAT, but that introduces a whole bunch of problems of its own which then need to be worked around. It doesn't make sense to use it unless you can't get public address space in the first place.