Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TheFuzzball 907 days ago
100%. When I was a similar age to OP and getting into web development it was the coolest thing in the world that I could map a port on my router and type in my public IP address at a friend's house and the website that I wrote would appear.

If I did the same thing now there's a good chance I'm behind CG-NAT and it won't work at all, and a 100% chance that my public IP won't be the same in 2 months.

We've really broken the internet. Between this and the average kid using a locked-down tablet the barrier to entry is higher than ever.

2 comments

My ISP is supposed to be moving users whose contract rollover to CGNAT.

This is why IPv6 needs to be available everywhere, including on mobile.

My ISP, in New Hampshire, Fidium, does not list IPv6 anywhere on their website. I asked the tech installing it. He told me no one uses it.

So, he cleared that up I guess.

I dunno, I don't really feel like having to use a service like dyndns or one of the dozens of clones is that big of a hurdle, is it? I recall using one of these services when I was in college (off-campus apartment with cable internet) back in the early 2000s.
For CG-NAT you don't actually get any inbound ports, so dynamic DNS won't help you.

That being said, I know some ISPs over here that will block standard ports inbound beyond SMTP when you're not behind CG-NAT. I can imagine that leading to some who are just starting giving up when they've followed all the instructions to get HTTP on port 80 working and it still doesn't work without explanation.

OK, fair point. Forgot about CG-NAT, but dyndns still meant I was able to access stuff remotely despite not having a static IP.
Yep, it's not a problem if you know how it works and don't have CG-NAT.

My point is that newbies don't know, and whilst the IP rotation problem might force some of them to learn about DNS, it will also put a bunch of people off entirely.