No, not like, say, a SIP client.

You seem pretty intent on not reading my whole comments or something. Mind responding to what I’m saying and not just making up your own arguments?

I’m saying “ipv6 alone won’t solve X”, and you’re saying “but what about Y?”

So once again, how do two devices both share port 5061 on a UPnP NAT with a single public IP address? Or even worse, if they're CGNAT'd? It's a simple answer with IPv6...

IPv6 was designed in a world where we thought we’d have a truly peer-to-peer internet where anyone could just talk to someone else’s device. This obviously isn’t what happened. An ipv6 proponent may say “this is because NAT breaks the necessary assumptions”, but that’s extremely oversimplified and wrong.

The reason that, when I use my iPhone to FaceTime my mom’s iPhone, it doesn’t just use SIP to contact her phone, isn’t because IPv4 and NAT. It’s because the very idea of that is nearly impossible to implement at scale even if everyone had a unique address.

I’m aware you can’t have multiple devices behind a NAT address listen on the same port. Thank you for pointing that out, you’re very smart. But it really doesn’t address my point at all, does it?

My point being that the reason we don’t use SIP and related technologies for billions of end user devices today, isn’t because of NAT. It’s because the myriad of other problems that would need to be solved for it to work reliably, and because of NAT. Eliminating NAT wouldn’t really meaningfully change the landscape of how software works. FaceTime calls would still go through Apple servers. People would still use centralized services run in real data centers, etc.

Ah, finally, you do acknowledge that there are issues that aren't actually solved with IPv4 and NAT. Thanks.

> But it really doesn’t address my point at all, does it?

Lets go back to the first thing I was reponding to.

> it still wouldn’t let you design something like a VoIP phone (or a pure peer-to-peer version of FaceTime) that just listened for connections and let other people “call” you by connecting to your device.

With having a public IP address, PMP enabled on my router, and DNS registration I have this today. My SIP phone here is sitting by, waiting for incoming calls. I don't need Apple's servers for this. Anyone with a SIP client and who knows the name can get to it (or trawls IPv6 space). This becomes a headache with IPv4 with multiple devices all wanting that 5061 port. Sure, one could just also tell people the port and have lots of random ports assigned, but that's just yet another bit of information to get lost, one more mapping to maintain, etc. Imagine if Amazon ran their ecommerce site off a random high number port instead of :443, think they'd get as much traffic?

That’s cool for you, congratulations.

I’m talking about the broader internet at large, and the billions of users on it, and the software that is written for these billions of users. This software does not behave the way your cool phone does. Because people’s IP’s change. They’re behind firewalls they are unable or don’t understand how to configure. We don’t write software this way for a lot of good reasons.

Now, I keep talking about this, then you bring up “but I have this use case, what about that?” Demanding an answer as if I give a shit that you want to run a SIP phone at your house, and you’re willing to configure your firewall, etc.

My whole point (!!!) is that what you’re doing is not what the billions of people using the internet are doing. When I bought my mom an iPhone, I didn’t have to tell her “ok so, FaceTime only works at your house, you have to reconfigure this DDNS service when your IP changes, you have to configure your router this way, and don’t ever leave the WiFi network or it won’t work, but thank god for ipv6, because it means dad can do all this too for his phone!” No. Because FaceTime doesn’t work that way, nor could it ever, because doing true peer to peer calling was never a thing that would have ever worked at scale. It’s not being held back by NAT. It’s being held back because it was never gonna work in the first place.*

I didn't have to configure the firewall, that happened automatically with PMP. That thing you didn't even know existed until a few hours ago.

But somehow you know all that is and is not possible. All that could have been if things were different.

I mean if you’re just going to sling ad-hominems around and invent your own argument so you have a chance at winning it, sure. I’m not aware of the specific RFC’s du jour that are used for auto-configuring routers. But after spending some time looking it up, it seems relatively niche (not as widespread as UPnP), and it appears the last 3 routers I’ve owned don’t support it. (I run an openbsd box with pf currently, but my unifi gateway before that didn’t support it, and the shitbox gateway Comcast gave me before that certainly didn’t support it. I could run a service on my openbsd box to support it but it wouldn’t make a difference because I’m perfectly capable of editing my pf.conf as it is.)

But if you’re gonna dig up other posts of mine to try and get a dig in at me, maybe at least read the rest of the post? You certainly haven’t done a good job of that so far.

Because I indicated that of course a protocol like this ought to exist, but what percentage of users of the broader internet are actually running a router that supports this? If you wanted to come out with a video calling app that only worked if your users had PMP working, what market share would you be losing out on? That’s the topic of discussion here after all (not that that’ll stop you from inventing your own discussion as you’ve continued to do.)

Funny way to say you don't know what you're talking about. If you don't know what technologies are actually out there how can you say what is and is not possible?

> but what percentage of users of the broader internet are actually running a router that supports this?

Most who aren't running their own home rolled pf setup that can't be bothered to read about "the latest" (over a decade old) RFCs.

And yeah, last I ran a UniFi gateway it supported PMP. That was several years ago. If it's a recent model device with halfway decent IPv6 support it's practically a sure thing it's got PMP support. Maybe disabled, but it supports it. Same with UPnP, might be disabled, but probably supported.

> Sick burn bro

> My post was basically the biggest pile of sarcasm I could conjure and you still took it seriously, congratulations!

> That’s cool for you, congratulations

> not that that’ll stop you from inventing your own discussion

> I don’t think I’ve met someone that truly thinks technological progress stopped in the 1990s and that URL’s and DNS are all we actually need.

And yet you accuse me of ad homenims for pointing out your acknowledgement of not knowing of the last decade+ of networking tech and that I have a need to feel superior. Pot meet kettle buddy.

You've spent so much effort telling me what's possible or not, berating me multiple times, while acknowledging you haven't kept up with decade+ old tech.