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?
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.
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.
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.
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?