This and the comments highlight how bad many ISPs in North America and Western Europe are at IPv6, still, in 2025, and the lengths to which people will go to treat that as damage and literally route around it.
One of the biggest ISPs in my country has been promising IPv6 since 2016. Another, smaller, competitor, advertised on "World IPv6 Day" in 2011 that it was way ahead of the competition on supplying IPv6; but in fact does not supply it today.
One of the answers I see given a lot over the years is: Yes, I know that I could do this simply with IPv6. But ISPs around here don't route IPv6, or even formally provide statically-assigned IPv4 to non-business customers. So I have had to build this Heath Robinson contraption instead.
The commentents suggest Tailscale, but the author assumes this could only mean Funnel, but you could use Tailscale/Headscale for handling the wiregiard and low-level networking / IP Allocation.
Then doing straight-forward iptables or L7, or reverse proxy via Caddy, Nginx, etc, directly to the routable IP address.
The outcome is the ~same, bonus is not having to handle the lower level component, negative is an extra "thing" to manage.
But this is how I do the same thing, and i'm quite happy with the result. I can also trivially add additional devices, and even use it for egress, giving me a good pool of exit-IP addresses.
(Note, I was going to add this as a comment on the blog, but it seems their captcha service is broken would not display - so it was blocked)
I haven't actually used Funnel, but I do use Cloudflare Tunnels + a VPS.
What I've done is that the VPS Nginx can talk over Tailscale to the server in question and the Cloudflare Tunnel lets those not on Tailscale (which is me sometimes) access the VPS.
Why not use a dynamic DNS service instead? I’ve been using dyn.com (now oci.dyn.com) for years and it has worked great. A bonus is many home routers have support built in.
Only works if you're not behind CGNAT, which has problems in and of itself. I pay my ISP an extra 29 DKK (about 4.50 USD at the moment) for a static address; my IPv4 connections and downloads in-general became way more stable after getting out from behind CGNAT.
CGNAT is hell. Here I had to choose between crap bandwidth or CGNAT. I chose crap bandwidth.
Hell for hosting, but if you're doing adversarial interoperability as a client, it does help you avoid being IP-banned. (At least in Western countries. I hear that Africa and Latin America tend to just get their CGNAT gateways banned because site operators don't give a shit about whether users from those regions can use their sites)
The client feature only works for websites that care about making exceptions for CGNAT users. Plenty of them simply ban the shared addresses.
That's part of the reason why countries like India are getting so many CAPTCHAs: websites don't care for the reason behind lackluster IP plans from CGNAT ISPs. If the ISP offered IPv6 support, people wouldn't have so many issues, but alas, apparently there's money for shitty CGNAT boxes but not IPv6 routers.
YouTube showed me a "this household watches suspiciously many videos" once when the provider moved us behind a CGNAT (because 100 households were suddenly watching from the same address, not just one).
It also messes a bit with geolocation, we frequently teleport to different places within the country.
It's not really overzealous since not banning the CGNAT IPs just gives the abusers safe harbor.
CGNAT is completely irrelevant to the average person. It’s only an issue if you expect others to connect to you, which is something that almost all people don’t need.
(inb4 but the internet was made to receive connections! Well yes, decades ago maybe. But that’s not the way things have evolved. Get with the times.)
> Cloudflare sometimes preventing access to some sites and annoying CAPTCHA challenges due to CGNAT are relevant to the average person.
They would be, but thankfully CGNAT doesn’t cause that.
Pathetic that in 2025 there still are games that rely on p2p connections, to the detriment of the experience because cheating can’t be detected server-side. GTA 5 is one of them.
If you're behind a CGNAT - check out hoppy.network
High quality IPv4 + a whole /56 IPv6 for $8/month
That's way more expensive than what I already have. My ISP, by default, provides me a /56, of which I'm only using two /64 subnets at the moment. For an extra 29 DKK (4.50 USD), I get a static IPv4 as well.
I also don't need to worry about the additional latency of a VPN, and have symmetric gigabit speeds, rather than 100Mbps up/down.
I have multiple devices on my internal network that I want to exist outside, and dynamic DNS is only going to let me expose one of them
If they don't all need distinct external IP addresses of their own, port forwarding is a typical approach.
That doesn't work well if you want to run the same service on multiple machines. For some you can proxy that (eg, for web you can just run nginx to proxy everything based on either the host header or SNI data), but for others you can't - you're only going to be able to have one machine accepting port 22 traffic for ssh.
I can port forward port 22 to a single machine. I can't proxy port 22 in a way that directs the incoming connection to the correct machine, at least not without client configuration.
Yeah, I currently have a VPS with various SSH port forwards allowing me to direct incoming connections of various types to my home computer which is behind NAT. It's evil and horrible and nasty for various reasons, not least of which that all your incoming connections look to your inner server like they come from the same IP address, preventing you from logging or filtering the source of any request. And you need to make sure if you forward incoming connections to your SMTP server that it doesn't think they are local trusted connections that it can relay onwards, turning your setup into an open relay.
Seriously thinking about switching to a setup similar to the article. I mean, my setup works for now, but it's un-pretty.
Yes, if I had multiple IPv4 addresses already it wouldn't be necessary to tunnel in additional IPv4 addresses, but since I don't and since there are no ISPs who will provide that to me at this physical address, tunneling is where I am.
In many countries, unless you buy a business broadband package (more expensive),residential internet does not come with such options.
The Google data strongly suggests that at this point it's probably available to a majority of home users. Corporate remains significantly worse. My employer, which paid me to do IPv6 stuff last century in a very different role, today has IPv6 for random outsiders but if you have a corporate issued laptop IPv6 is disabled and they cheerfully explained that it's "difficult" in a call this week right before I pointed out what I was paid to do and where a quarter century ago. Embarrassing for them.
Yes, that's how it works when you only have a single IP. The standard way to deal with this is a reverse proxy for web requests. Other services require different workarounds. I have a port 22 SSH server for git activities, and another on a different port that acts as a gateway. From that machine I can SSH again to anywhere within my local network.
It's really not onerous or complicated at all. It's about as simple as it gets. I'm hosting a dozen web services behind a single IP4 address. Adding a new service is even easier than without the proxy setup. Instead of dicking around with my firewall and port forwarding, I just add an entry to my reverse proxy. I don't even use IPs, I just let my local DNS resolve hostnames for me. Easy as.
The entire point of this is that I don't want to deal with non-standard port numbers or bouncing through hosts. I want to be able to host services in the normal boring way, and this approach lets me do that without needing to worry about dynamic DNS updates whenever my public IP changes.
Same for me, I actually like having a reverse proxy as a single point of entry for all my web services. I also run OpenVPN on 443 using the port share feature and as a result I only need one IP address and one open port for everything.
This is what I do, except the dynamic DNS service is just a script on my server that updates Cloudflare DNS with my current external IP. In practice my address is almost static, I've never seen it change except when my router is reset/reconfigured.
Many DNS registrars support updates via API these days. I use Porkbun and ddclient to update it. Slight rub is I couldn't get it to work for the apex domain. Not sure where the limitation lies.
Lovely write up! Personally, I just settled on Tailscale so I don’t have to manage WireGuard and iptables myself.
For a while I also thought that regular SSH tunnels would be enough but they kept failing occasionally even with autossh.
Oh and I got bitten by Docker default MTU settings when trying to add everything to the same Swarm cluster.
I run a very small VPS at Hetzner with Pangolin on it that takes care of all the Traefic Wireguard tunneling to my home servers. Very easy to set up and operate.
Cool! Do you like that approach? I've thought about setting up that exact thing but I wasn't sure how well it would work in practice. Are there any pitfalls you ran into early on? I might give it a shot after your "very easy to set up and operate" review!
Honestly it was very easy. Their documentation is decent, and the defaults are good.
Setting up Pangolin on the VPS, and Newt on your lan, connecting them and adding e.g. a small demo website as a resource on Pagolin will take you about half an hour (unless your domain propagation is slow, so always start by defining the name in DNS and point it to your VPS IP to start with. You can use a wildcard if you do not want to manually make a new DNS entry each time)
What is the vps for? Just the static ip?
To have a public front that is outside of the lan firewall. The idea is that you do not have to open your lan to anything. The only communication will be the encrypted wireguard tunnel between the VPS and your Newt instance.
You can run the Pangolin also on the lan, but you will need to open a few ports then on your lan firewall, and manage your ddns etc. if you do not have a fixed IP at home.
For less than 4€/month I opted for the VPS route.
Yeah, this is the way to do this. I'm pretty sure that if you for some reason do not want to run wireguard on all your servers you could fairly easily adjust this recipe to have a centralized wg gateway on your local network instead.
I think I've seen some scripts floating around to automate this process but can't remember where. There are lots of good related tools listed here: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
Quote from OPs ISP [1]:
"Factors leading to a successful installation: Safe access to the roof without need for a helicopter."
[1] https://www.monkeybrains.net/residential.php#residential
I wish I had access to a small ISP. It is comforting to know that if something goes wrong, on the other end of the line there is someone with a Cisco shell open ready to run a traceroute.
For sure…in case of reaction times and flexibility they are great…Until something serious happens outside of their scope.
Like what? Their scope is being an ISP, i.e. routing packets.
Usually it‘s about standing, resources and options. Serious problems like fibre cuts, local power outages and DDoS attacks are usually not in their scope and they have to wait for 3rd parties to fix these problems with little iptions to speed up those processes. Bigger ISP usually have teams/departments which have well established processes/solutions to tackle these problems. That said, I‘m totally aware that each of them (small or big ISP) have their pros and cons - as always it mainly depends on your use case and requirements.
How is the author getting a symmetric 600mbps connection with Monkeybrains? They're an awesome local ISP and provide internet via roof mounted PtM wireless connections.
I want to love them, but sadly I only get an unreliable 80mbps/40mbps connection from them. With occasional latency spikes that make it much worse. To make up for this I run a multi-WAN gateway connecting to my neighbor/friend's Comcast as well. Here's the monkeybrains (https://i.imgur.com/FaByZbw.jpeg) vs comcast (https://i.imgur.com/jTa6Ldk.jpeg) latency log.
Curious if the author had to do anything special to get a symmetric 600mbps from Monkeybrains. They make no guarantees about speed at all, but are quite cheap, wholesome, and have great support. Albeit support hasn't been able to get me anywhere close to the author's speeds.
I love Monkeybrains! I had something in the neighborhood of a 600mbps symmetric connection through them in the late 2010s when I lived in SF. The only issue was when it rained hard the speeds would deteriorate.
Interesting you're getting such slow speeds. Ask them if a tech can stop by and troubleshoot with you.
I did the same thing 20 years ago, but I used vtun because Wireguard didn't exist yet. It's a cool way to get around the bogus limitations on residential static IP addresses.
At the time, my FiOS was about $80/month, but they wanted $300/month for a static IP. I used a VPS (at the time with CrystalTech), which was less than $50/month. Net savings: $170/month.
> At the time, my FiOS was about $80/month, but they wanted $300/month for a static IP.
So ridiculous.
It’s fast, far quicker than I can use, and the static IP was a one off $10 or similar.
Another alternative could be a cloudflare tunnel. It requires installing their Daemon on the server and setting up DNS in their control panel. No ports need opening from the outside in.
The downside of the Cloudflare approach is that yet more websites are behind Cloudflare's control. The VPS approach works pretty much the same way Cloudflare does, but without the centralized control.
On the other hand, Cloudflare is a pretty easy solution against spam bots and scrapers. Probably a better choice if that's something you need protection against.
I think both are great options. Personally I do split-dns so I can access things "directly" while using Tailscale and via Cloudflare Tunnel when I am not.
I also selectively expose via the Cloudflare Tunnel. Most things are tailscale only.
Everyone does these days, although its really the AI scrapers you need defence from and Cloudflare isn't doing so good at that yet.
As someone who actually hosts stuff at home, I'm not sure everyone does. I don't, for one
Maybe if you're on a limited data plan (like in Belgium or on mobile data), you'd want to prevent unnecessary pageloads? Afaik that doesn't apply to most home connections
Or if you want to absolutely prevent that LLMs eat your content for moral/copyright reasons, then it can't be on the open internet no matter who your gateway is
ai scrapers are truly this year's boogeyman
I used to expose a site hosted on my home NAS through it, and now I do the same from a server at Hetzner.
Works like magic :)
I would highly recommend reading up on VRFs and slotting that into the policy routing bits. It's really almost the same thing (same "ip route" commands with 'table' even), but better encapsulated.
I do something similar. I run a nebula network. The vps has haproxy and is passing the encrypted data to the hosts using sni to figure out the specific host. No keys on the vps.
The vps and each host are each nebula nodes. I can put the nodes wherever i want. Some are on an additional vps, some are running on proxmox locally. I even have one application running as a geo-isolated and redundant application on a small computer at my friend’s house in another state.
I switched from Nebula to Yggdrasil (IPv6, global, but not the same as public IPv6). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43967082
This Nebula? https://github.com/slackhq/nebula
Yes. Thats the one. Works really well. Basically a free version of tailscale. A bit more of a learning curve.
Headscale [1] has a stronger claim to "free version of Tailscale" - it's literally a self-hosted version of Tailscale's coordination server. It's even compatible with the Tailscale client.
The problem with Headscale is that it has absolutely no documentation. All of it is described in relation to Tailscale, which is what I don't want to use. Here are the Tailscale features we have, here are the differences with Tailscale. It's very weird.
> multiple world routeable IPv4 addresses
It's pretty rare that you would need more than one.
If you're running different types of services (e.g. http, mail, ftp) then they each use their own ports and the ports can be mapped to different local machines from the same public IP address.
The most common one where you're likely to have multiple public services using the same protocol is http[s], and for that you can use a reverse proxy. This is only a few lines of config for nginx or haproxy and then you're doing yourself a favor because adding a new one is just adding a single line to the reverse proxy's config instead of having to configure and pay for another IPv4 address.
And if you want to expose multiple private services then have your clients use a VPN and then it's only the VPN that needs a public IP because the clients just use the private IPs over the VPN.
To actually need multiple public IPs you'd have to be doing something like running multiple independent public FTP servers while needing them all to use the official port. Don't contribute to the IPv4 address shortage. :)
I would suggest putting a disclaimer on the article to warn any noobs that prior to opening up a server on the internet basic security needs to be in place.
Hm, 600 symmetric with monkeybrains?? I’ve had monkeybrains for over 3 years and have never seen over 200 down. In fact, I reached out to them today because for the last 3 months it’s been about 50 down or less. Like, I can barely stream content slow. What gives? I am in a 6 unit in lower haight. Most of the units also have MB. The hardware is relatively new (2019?). What gives?
This is an interesting usecase for a jumpbox. So what if we install a reverse proxy on the vps and use wireguard to redirect to services at home(nonstatic)? Would that work too? any risks that you can see?
There are tools specifically built for hosting stuff without public IP such as https://pinggy.io
There are a number of paid services like that yes.
> Let's say the external IP address you're going to use for that machine is 321.985.520.309 and the wireguard address of your local system is 867.420.696.005.
What is going on here with these addresses? I'm used to seeing stuff like this in movies – where it always destroys my immersion because now I have to think about the clueless person who did the computer visuals – but surely this author knows about IPv4 addresses?
The author did not want to use real addresses and was not aware of the 192.0.2.0/24, 198.51.100.0/24, and 203.0.113.0/24 ranges specified in RFC 5737 - IPv4 Address Blocks Reserved for Documentation.
TIL!!!
My only concern is logging. Will the webserver on your local server log the real ip address of your visitors, or will it log all traffics as coming from your vps?
I do something similar but using GRE since I don't need encryption. Then I have OSPF on the resulting overlay network (there are several sites) to deal with ISP outages. One hop is via Starlink and that does use Wireguard because Elon likes to block tunnel packets but we gets through.
Why would you want to expose your IP to the internet? I still feel that's dangerous, susceptible to DDoS attack, and I avoid that as much as possible. I put everything behind a Tailscale for internal use and behind Cloudflare for external use.
In this case they're re-exposing the server(s) to the public internet, but their actual IP Address is still very much hidden behind the Wireguard connection to the VPS.
The IPs they're talking about exposing are ones which are on a VPS, not their home router, or the internal IPs identifying a device in Wireguard.
What the heck? That's like not wanting a street address because people might come to block your front door somehow, or burglars might find your building and steal from it. The big brothers you mention would be like gated/walled communities in this analogy I guess
Saying this as someone who's hosted from at home for like 15 years
Also realise that you're sending the IP address to every website you visit, and in most VoIP software, to those you call. Or if you use a VPN 24/7 on all devices, then it's the VPN's IP address in place of the ISP's IP address...
I don’t think this is the right analogue. Having someone come to your door breaking things would take much larger effort, and easy to be caught. But DDoS or attack your service has minimal cost.
Visiting sites and sending the IP address is not the problem, the router has firewall and basically blocking unwanted attention. But when you expose something without protection and allow someone to burn your CPU, or, in a worse case, figure out your password for a not properly secured service, is a totally another issue.
I saw people setting up honey pot SSH and there are so many unauthorized access and I got scared. I think exposing entire machine to network is like you drive car without insurance. Sure you might be OK, but when trouble comes, it will be a lot of trouble.
> basically blocking unwanted attention. But when you expose something without protection and allow someone to burn your CPU
... sure. You'd think I'd have noticed that in nearly two decades of hosting all different kinds of services if this were a thing
Yeah and of course it will be depend on your personality and risk model. Compared to other things I don’t want to risk my data, whether leaked or damaged. And I make mistakes, a lot. If you are very meticulous and can ensure that you can put up all the security measures yourself and won’t expose something you don’t want to. I am just not that kind of person.
I'm not meticulous either. I had one responsible disclosure and a few times where I noticed issues myself but never that an attacker discovered it first. There's not that many malicious people. The only scenario where you realistically get pwned is when there is a stable and automated exploit for a widely spread service that can be automatically discovered, something like Heartbleed or maybe if a WordPress plugin has an SQL injection or so
Run unattended upgrades, or the equivalent for whatever update mechanism you use, and you'll be fine. I've seen banks with more outdated running services than me at home... (I do security consulting, hence)
To do that people have to physically come to my house and there are solutions to that, people can fuck with my internet from anywhere in the world. It's similar to why remote internet voting is such a pandora's box of issues.
There's 4 billion front doors on the v4 internet. Sending you a DDoS is transient (not like doing something to you physically) and doesn't scale to lots of websites, especially for no gain
In addition to myself, I know some people who self host but not any who ever had a meaningful DDoS. If you're hosting an unpopular website or NAS, nobody is going to be interested in wasting their capacity on bothering you for no reason
Anything that requires custom effort (not just sending the same packets to every host) doesn't scale either. You can host an SQL injection pretty much indefinitely with nobody discovering it, so long as it's not in standard software that someone might scan for, and if it is, then there'll be automatic updates for it. Not that I'd recommend hosting custom vulnerable software, but either way: in terms of `risk = chance × impact` the added risk of self hosting compared to datacentre hosting is absolutely negligible, so long as you apply the same apt upgrade policy in either situation
Online voting has nothing to do with these phantom risks of self hosting
I feel like I missed a preread that teaches me about these strangle super-numeric ip addresses. Eg 400.564.987.500
Am I just seeing ipv6 in an unusually familiar format? Or is it an intentionally malformed format used by wireguard for internal routing?
Looks like modified placeholder addresses because the author didn't want to use real addresses. I don't think it could be used for internal routing since each octet is represented with a single byte (0-255) so having larger numbers for some internal routing would likely break the entire IP stack.
Yes the author needs to be beaten over the head with RFC 5737.
This is an interesting solution and wouldn't mind using one of my existing servers as a gateway or proxy (?).
Is there a way to be selective about what ports are exposed from the host to the target? The target could handle it but fine grained control is nice.
You could just set a default deny iptables policy for forwarding to that host, and then explicitly open the ports you want
iptables is legacy now and if you're not already well-versed in it, better go straight to nftables (which should be easier to get started with anyway). On modern systems, iptables commands are translated to nftables equivalents by transitional package.
Recommend trying vrf (l3mdev) for this (dual interface w/ 0.0.0.0/0 route) setup.
Put the wg interface in a new vrf, and spawn your self-hosted server in that vrf (ip vrf exec xxx command).
Wont sell you a static ip? Not even ipv6? Thats just incompetence.
How is it different from self hosting locally with Cloudflare tunnels or Tailscale?
E.g. I have a PiZero attached to my router and it’s exposed to the internet via Cloudflare tunnels.
i also do cloudflare tunnel.
I've taken the easier solution of Cloudflare's free Tunnel service so my IP is less exposed and I don't have to poke holes in my firewall.
Last I checked Cloudflare insisted on terminating TLS on the free tier.
On principle, I prefer to poke a hole in my firewall than allow surveillance of the plaintext traffic.
I think they have to for tunnels to work. They rewrite the headers so the target server doesn't have to have any special config to recognize abc.example.xyz as being itself.
I think in theory you could get it without it but that would be a lot more work on the recipient side.
Me I'm less worried about that so I accept the convenience of not having to setup a reverse proxy and poke a hole in my router.
Putting a privkey on your VPS seems like asking for trouble.
A similar simple option: https://github.com/hyprspace/hyprspace
you can also run a proxy on the vps instead of the nat.
Depends on the protocol. For web, sure - for ssh, nope, since the protocol doesn't indicate which machine it's trying to connect to and so you don't know where to proxy it to.
You can still TCP proxy SSH just fine (one port per target host obv)
Certain UDP-based protocols may be hairier, though.
I don't know what you mean by "the protocol". There is a destination IP address on every packet... getsockname() will tell the proxy which local IP the client dialed, allowing it to create "virtual hosts" (or you can actually run multiple proxies bound on different local addresses).
I have one public IP address. I have three machines behind it that I want to SSH into. How does the machine with the public address know where to route an incoming port 22 packet? For HTTPS this is easy - browsers send the desired site in the SNI field of the TLS handshake, so the frontend can look at that and route appropriately. For SSH there's no indication of which host the packet is intended for.
Note that this is not the only meaning of "virtual hosting". It is very commonly used with different addresses or ports. For example, the Apache `<VirtualHost addr:port>` block. It gets confusing because this is the same block that was used for "named-based virtualhost" (different `ServerName` in the same `<VirtualHost>`). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_hosting
Well you can't, but that wouldn't work with routing either, and it is not the situation at hand: in the article there are multiple IPs on the VPS:
> you now have multiple real-world IP addresses that people can get to
In your new situation that is not the one in the article, you can just use different ports.
Socket based proxying is better for this, since you eliminate one point from your attack surface (if your proxy server gets compromised, it's just encrypted ssh/TLS)
Too lazy to set up wireguard. I just use ssh -L. And if there is another server in the way I hop with ssh -J -L
Things like this that go through some external VPS always seem a bit pointless to me.
just host it on the VPS directly
I have workloads that need 32T of enterprise nvme that I run on a machine in my garage.
How much for a VPS that supports bandwidth to access those 32T data frequently?
Sometimes you don't have to access those 32TB data in raw. You often need only the processed data, which can be magnitudes smaller.
Your local machine holds and processes the raw data, while your VPS forwards the much smaller processed data to the Internet.
A VPS that relays traffic and a VPS that runs services are very different.
Um that article is not at all about what I expected. It solves a particular problem, which is not having a static IP address. I happen to have one, so that's not an issue.
But I still have so much to consider when doing local hosting. Redundant electricity? IP connectivity? What if some hardware dies? What if I get DDoS'ed? How do I get all relevant security fixes applied asap? How do I properly isolate the server from other home networking like kid's laptops and TV with Netflix? ...?
All solvable of course, but that's what I'd have expected in such an article.
I wrote about doing the same thing in 2016[1], crazy to think that we STILL don't have IPv6.
1: https://stosb.com/blog/using-an-external-server-and-a-vpn-to...
> Let's say the external IP address you're going to use for that machine is 321.985.520.309 and the wireguard address of your local system is 867.420.696.005.
What kind of IP addresses are these?
This article was not worth having to solve a captcha to read.
I think I will be done with sites that require me to solve captchas to visit for simple reading, just as I am done with sites that require me to run javascript to read their text.
At least it is technically possible to complete the dreamwidth captchas now. For many years (well before the modern corporate spidering insanity) dreamwidth was just completely inaccessible no matter how many times one completed their captchas. You'd have to be running a recent version of Chrome or the like.
Now after doing the captcha ~5 times and getting nothing a different captcha pops up that actually works and lets one in.
It's not good but it's a hell of a lot better than their old system.
At least you get a CAPTCHA. All I get is a "403 Forbidden" with zero extra information. Tried from two different ISPs and different devices.
how do you feel about proof of work human detection mechanisms? I think those are more tolerable given that it's just a short pause in browsing.
(Not the person you asked)
I keep waiting for someone trying to use the web on an older computer who's sitting there for 30 seconds every time they click another search result. Or a battery-powered device that now uses a lot of inefficient high frequency clock cycles to get these computations out of the way
But so far I've heard nobody! And they've been fast on my phone. Does this really keep bots out? I'm quite surprised in both directions (how little computation apparently already helps and how few people run into significant issues)
When this came up 15 years ago (when PoW was hyping due to Bitcoin and Litecoin) the conversation was certainly different than how people regard this today. Now we just need an email version of it and I'm curious if mass spam becomes a thing of the past as well
I can't even access the article, I get a 403. Here's a text mirror:
I'm lucky enough to have a weird niche ISP available to me, so I'm paying $35 a month for around 600MBit symmetric data. Unfortunately they don't offer static IP addresses to residential customers, and nor do they allow multiple IP addresses per connection, and I'm the sort of person who'd like to run a bunch of stuff myself, so I've been looking for ways to manage this.
What I've ended up doing is renting a cheap VPS from a vendor that lets me add multiple IP addresses for minimal extra cost. The precise nature of the VPS isn't relevant - you just want a machine (it doesn't need much CPU, RAM, or storage) that has multiple world routeable IPv4 addresses associated with it and has no port blocks on incoming traffic. Ideally it's geographically local and peers with your ISP in order to reduce additional latency, but that's a nice to have rather than a requirement.
By setting that up you now have multiple real-world IP addresses that people can get to. How do we get them to the machine in your house you want to be accessible? First we need a connection between that machine and your VPS, and the easiest approach here is Wireguard. We only need a point-to-point link, nothing routable, and none of the IP addresses involved need to have anything to do with any of the rest of your network. So, on your local machine you want something like:
[Interface] PrivateKey = privkeyhere ListenPort = 51820 Address = localaddr/32
[Peer] Endpoint = VPS:51820 PublicKey = pubkeyhere AllowedIPs = VPS/0
And on your VPS, something like:
[Interface] Address = vpswgaddr/32 SaveConfig = true ListenPort = 51820 PrivateKey = privkeyhere
[Peer] PublicKey = pubkeyhere AllowedIPs = localaddr/32
The addresses here are (other than the VPS address) arbitrary - but they do need to be consistent, otherwise Wireguard is going to be unhappy and your packets will not have a fun time. Bring that interface up with wg-quick and make sure the devices can ping each other. Hurrah! That's the easy bit.
Now you want packets from the outside world to get to your internal machine. Let's say the external IP address you're going to use for that machine is 321.985.520.309 and the wireguard address of your local system is 867.420.696.005. On the VPS, you're going to want to do:
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -d 321.985.520.309 -j DNAT --to-destination 867.420.696.005
Now, all incoming packets for 321.985.520.309 will be rewritten to head towards 867.420.696.005 instead (make sure you've set net.ipv4.ip_forward to 1 via sysctl!). Victory! Or is it? Well, no.
What we're doing here is rewriting the destination address of the packets so instead of heading to an address associated with the VPS, they're now going to head to your internal system over the Wireguard link. Which is then going to ignore them, because the AllowedIPs statement in the config only allows packets coming from your VPS, and these packets still have their original source IP. We could rewrite the source IP to match the VPS IP, but then you'd have no idea where any of these packets were coming from, and that sucks. Let's do something better. On the local machine, in the peer, let's update AllowedIps to 0.0.0.0/0 to permit packets form any source to appear over our Wireguard link. But if we bring the interface up now, it'll try to route all traffic over the Wireguard link, which isn't what we want. So we'll add table = off to the interface stanza of the config to disable that, and now we can bring the interface up without breaking everything but still allowing packets to reach us. However, we do still need to tell the kernel how to reach the remote VPN endpoint, which we can do with ip route add vpswgaddr dev wg0. Add this to the interface stanza as:
PostUp = ip route add vpswgaddr dev wg0 PreDown = ip route del vpswgaddr dev wg0
That's half the battle. The problem is that they're going to show up there with the source address still set to the original source IP, and your internal system is (because Linux) going to notice it has the ability to just send replies to the outside world via your ISP rather than via Wireguard and nothing is going to work. Thanks, Linux. Thinux.
But there's a way to solve this - policy routing. Linux allows you to have multiple separate routing tables, and define policy that controls which routing table will be used for a given packet. First, let's define a new table reference. On the local machine, edit /etc/iproute2/rt_tables and add a new entry that's something like:
1 wireguard
where "1" is just a standin for a number not otherwise used there. Now edit your wireguard config and replace table=off with table=wireguard - Wireguard will now update the wireguard routing table rather than the global one. Now all we need to do is to tell the kernel to push packets into the appropriate routing table - we can do that with ip rule add from localaddr lookup wireguard, which tells the kernel to take any packet coming from our Wireguard address and push it via the Wireguard routing table. Add that to your Wireguard interface config as:
PostUp = ip rule add from localaddr lookup wireguard PreDown = ip rule del from localaddr lookup wireguard and now your local system is effectively on the internet.
You can do this for multiple systems - just configure additional Wireguard interfaces on the VPS and make sure they're all listening on different ports. If your local IP changes then your local machines will end up reconnecting to the VPS, but to the outside world their accessible IP address will remain the same. It's like having a real IP without the pain of convincing your ISP to give it to you.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20250618061131/https://mjg59.dre...
Pretty much! My ISP was founded by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Rucker and is somewhat cheap and delightful and happily routes me a good amount of IPv6, and every 48 hours or so it RAs me an entirely different range even though I still have validity on the lease for the old one and everything breaks, so I've had to turn IPv6 off entirely (I sent dumps of the relevant lease traffic to support, they said they'd look into it, and then the ticket auto closed after being inactive for two years). I spent a while trying to make things work with IPv6 but the combination of it being broken at my end and also there still being enough people I want to provide access to who don't have it means it just wasn't a good option.
One of my places uses Frontier FiOS (soon to become Verizon again). They have zero support for IPv6, and it isn't even on their roadmap.
I use a static HE (Hurricane Electric) IPv6 tunnel there, and it works great.
The only issue is that YouTube thinks the IPv6 block is commercial or an AI dev scraping their content, so I can't look at videos unless I'm logged in to YouTube.
I’m also on FiOS, and despite repeated statements to the effect I’d never get IPv6 on my (20 year) old ONT, I’ve got a nice little /56 block assigned on my kit via DHCPv6. Problem is that, as it’s a DHCP block, it changes, and Namecheap presently does not offer any sort of Dynamic DNS for IPv6 addresses.
Still, it let me tear down the HE IPv6 tunnel I was also running, since the sole reason I needed IPv6 was so our household game consoles could all play online without cursed firewall rules and IP reservations. I’m pretty chuffed with the present status quo, even if it’s far from perfect.
One other thing I’d note about OPs article (for folks considering it as a way to work around shitty ISP policies) is that once you have this up and running, you also have a perfect setup for a reverse proxy deployment for your public services. Just make sure you’re watching your bandwidth so you don’t get a surprise bill.
For a long time, I operated from home with a auction-purchased IPv4 /24 just so I could get around all this BS and have my own AS.
There's nothing nicer than being able to BGP peer and just handle everything yourself. I really miss old Level 3 (before the Lumen/CenturyLink buyout).
Kind of kicking myself for selling my netblock but it was a decent amount of money ($6000).
I'm doing exactly this. I got my netblock for free in 1993, back in the Internic days before ARIN existed. I have a couple of VPSes running BGP and tunnel traffic back to my home over wireguard.
Hey!
What if I you will your netblock to me? I'll will you my camaro and my collection of amiga parts.
(I really want your netblock)
hah! If I wasn't actively using it, I'd consider renting it out. I bet you could find some early Internet dude that has a /24 they're not using
Mine officially supports it. However having configured the Prefix as they define and using SLAAC etc all my devices get their IPv6 addresses and can access the internet, I can even connect from outside the network so it all "works", but I have a bunch of issues. Neither of my ISPs defined DNS servers is available, I can't route one of the OpenDNS routers but the other works fine and then I have these periods where the entirity of IPv6 routing breaks for about a minute and then restores. Having done this with two different routers on completely different firmware now I can't help but think my official support from my ISP is garbage and they have major problems with it. I had to turn it off because it causes all sorts of problems.
> Heath Robinson contraption
Ah, I see you also watched that video yesterday on manufacturing a tiny electric rotor.
I actually learned the expression when I was a child, via the Professor Branestawm books.
Ok so this is genuinely a case of I see an expression for the first time, learn an expression it, and then see it again immediately after. Fun.
I just learned about this yesterday.
Fellow Branestawm enthusiast here. That is the first time anyone has ever mentioned Professor Branestawm on HN, as far as I can tell! It's triggering deep memories.
"Heath Robinson" is British English for "Rube Goldberg".
TIL
Me too, at first I thought it was a takeoff on "Heathkit". Silly me, I guess.
I'm in western Europe and every ISP but the ultra cheap ones and the niche use case ones have stable IPv6 prefixes. Some do /48, others /56.
IPv4 is getting CGNAT'd more and more, on the other hand. One national ISP basically lets you pick between IPv4 CGNAT and IPv6 support (with IPv6 being the default). Another has been rolling out CGNAT IPv4 for new customers (at first without even offering IPv6, took them a few months to correct that).
This isn't even an "America and Western Europe" thing. It's a "whatever batshit insane approach the local ISP took" thing. And it's not just affecting IPv6 either.
I feel like it’s malicious. They don’t want to support it because it means they can’t charge high prices for static IPs
Once again I voice the only sane option: Skip IPv6 and the insanity that it is, and do IPv8 and simply double (or quadruple) the address space without introducing other new things.
It'll be objectively worse. IPv6 is at least sort of supported by a non-negligible number of devices, software and organizations. This IPv8 would be a whole new protocol, that no one out there supports. The fact that version 8 was already defined in [an obsolete] RFC1621 doesn't help either.
Even if you decide to try to make it a Frankenstein's monster of a protocol, making it a two IPv4 packets wrapped in each other to create a v4+v4=v8 address space, you'll need a whole new routing solution for the Internet, as those encapsulations would have issues with NATs. And that'll be way more error prone (and thus, less secure), because it'll be theoretically possible to accidentally mix up v4 and inner-half-of-v8 traffic.
Nah, if we can't get enough people to adopt IPv6, there's no chance we'll get even more people to adopt some other IPvX (unless something truly extraordinary happens that would trigger such adoption, of course).
Are you saying you believe it's truly impossible to create a new backwards compatible standard that expands the address space and doesn't require everyone to upgrade for it to work?
I'm not going to say it's truly impossible, but it's practically just-about impossible.
There's no straightforward way of getting old hosts to be able to address anything in the new expanded space, or older routers to be able to route to it.
So you have to basically dual-stack it, and, oops, you've created the exact same situation with IPv6...
If it's possible, why has no one done it? Most of the backwards compatible "solutions" that are presented just run into the same issues as IPv6 but with a more quirky design.
That standard was IPv4 with NAT ;) Unfortunately, it doesn't allow for end-to-end connectivity.
This is a pipe dream in the current century. IPv6 adoption has been slow but it’s approaching 50% and absolutely nobody is going to go through the trouble of implementing a new protocol; updating every operating system, network, and security tool; and waiting a decade for users to upgrade without a big advantage. “I don’t want to learn IPv6” is nowhere near that level of advantage.
The reason IPv6 adoption is lacking is that there's no business case for it from consumer-grade ISPs, not that there's an inherent problem with IPv6. Your proposed IPv8 standard would have the exact same adoption issues.
IPv6 is the reason why we can't have IPv6
Your IPv8 is what IPv6 should have been. Instead, IPv6 decided to re-invent way too much, and is why we can't have nice things are are stuck with IPv4 and NAT. Just doubling the address width would have given us 90% of the benefit of V6 with far less complexity and would have been adopted much, much, much faster.
I just ported some (BSD) kernel code from V4 to V6. If the address width was just twice as big, and not 4x as big, a lot of the fugly stuff you have to deal with in C would never have happened. A sockaddr could have been expanded by 2 bytes to handle V6. There would not be all these oddball casts between V4/V6, and entirely different IP packet handling routines because of data size differences and differences in stuff like route and mac address lookup.
Another pet peeve of mine from my days working on hardware is IPv6 extension headers. There is no limit in the protocol to how many extension headers a packet can have. This makes verifying ASICS hard, and leads to very poor support for them. I remember when we were implementing them and we had a nice way to do it, we looked at what our competitors did. We found most of them just disabled any advanced features when more than 1 extension header was present.
IPv6 reinvented hardly anything. It's pretty much IPv4, with longer addresses, and a handful of trivial things people wished were in IPv4 by consensus (e.g. fragmentation only at end hosts; less redundant checksums).
The main disagreements have been above what to do with the new addresses e.g. some platforms insist on SLAAC. (Which is good because it forces your ISP to give you a /64).
Devices operating at the IP layer aren't allowed to care about extension headers other than hop-by-hop, which must be the first header for this reason. Breaking your stupid middlebox is considered a good thing because these middleboxes are constantly breaking everyone's connections.
Your sockaddr complaints WOULD apply at double address length on platforms other than your favorite one. The IETF shouldn't be in charge of making BSD's API slightly more convenient at the expense of literally everything else. And with addresses twice as long, they wouldn't be as effectively infinite. You'd still need to be assigned one from your ISP. They'd still probably only give you one, or worse, charge you based on your number of devices. You'd still probably have NAT.
That is not a sane option. IPv6 isn't actually that hard, companies are just lazy and refuse to implement it (or implement it correctly).
IPv6 is often simpler to administer than IPv4. Subnetting is simpler for the common cases. SLAAC eliminates the need for DHCP on many local networks. There's no NAT to deal with (a good thing!) Prefix delegation can be annoying if the prefix changes (my /56 hasn't in almost 3 years.) Other than that, it's mostly the same.
> There's no NAT to deal with
I frequently see this claim made but it simply isn't true. NAT isn't inherent to a protocol it's something the user does on top of it. You can NAT IPv6 just fine there just isn't the same pressure to do so.
I nat IPv6 on one of my servers because having seperate ipv6 for VMS but the same IPv4 has caused some issues with running mail servers and certificates. If only I could drop IPv4 completely