A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Yeah it's fucked up.
I've noticed that on my cell phone's cell connection, I can't access my home server, but I can access my cloud site. I'm guessing either XFinity blocks connections from cell IPs thinking they're spam, or my cell carrier blocks connections to home IPs thinking they're scams.
With a little more debugging I'll either change cell carriers or ISPs soon I hope. If I have to register a business maybe I'll make an LLC and run a lemonade stand or something lol.
They don't care about "capitalist cloud services", they just care about money. If they can charge you a premium for more advanced features (they can) then they will.
There are some good ISPs out there. My ISP in Australia (Leaptel) gives me the option to enable static IPv6 /48 for free.
No german ISP that i know of does this, it's awful. One doesn't even offer reverse IP ptr entries whatsoever, even if you had a static IP.
You know, what's kind of encouraging is that I posted something similar to this complaint on reddit, and 100% of the responses were corporate apologia how it would apparently be so much work and so much more expensive to provide a static instead of a dynamic IP, or how routing through VPSes is so much better anyway. I hadn't realized the reddit to lemmy brain drain was so bad, which seems good for decentralized morally good hosting.
Cries in American 🇺🇸😿
You're not wrong. And the line between evil and laziness here is too messy for me to sort out. We got into this mess because the internet was originally designed as a communication tool between business, university, and government. Specifically, Bell Labs connecting universities as part of the military project DARPA. Since they were connecting dozens of sites, the 4 billion addresses (2^32) seemed like plenty.
Skipping over dialup and forward to early broadband, the issue of the number of addresses problem was 'solved' by a clever firewall technique network address translation (NAT). It was adversited as a security feature, but it allowed ISPs to give one public IP per customer. This standardized things for them - they give you one IP and you multiplex it as you wish. However, since the average customer wanted a turnkey solution, the ISPs would then toss in the modem as a rental. (Also, as enshitification hit this rental modem started getting more user hostile.)
But at this point ISPs are engorged and lazy and redoing everything is a chore, so they got one IPv6 space for everyone, and set up their IPv6 servers to assign chucks of that space based on your assigned IPv4 address. Easy-peasy! Now none of their other management or billing systems have to change! Of course, now your v6 space moves anytime your v4 space does but -they always have those business accounts to sell you …
A diamond in the rough: When I was younger, working at a data center and IPv6 was new, I found this gem coupled with IPv6 world day (via Reddit): https://tunnelbroker.net/
Hurricane Electric was/is happy to give you a free static IPv6 /48 prefix, and you could tunnel your home connection directly to this (like a site to site VPN). Their catch is if you start pushing significant traffic you'll have to pay market rates. But if your goal is to add a free static IPv6 frontend to your home network, this has been here the whole time.
Similarly, I've read Cloudflare's Terms of Service [privacy policy, et al.] and they're fairly tame compared to many. I'm also partial to their WARP technology. The idea is the end user's traffic is encrypted and sent to any of Cloudflare's servers and from there they can then bounce to anywhere in the world (a handy trick if you need to get around a great firewall or other tools of censorship). If your home lab uses Cloudflare's tunnel, and your phones use WARP, the only thing a third party can see it that you're using the largest CDN in the world - which is sorta a 'well, duh' statement. Cloudflare's schtick is they don't need limits - they can flood you home connection and it wouldn't be a blip on their radar. However, they need to run variations of these technologies to operate their primary business. So making a copy for you to use is almost trivial. (And if you go viral and suddenly need a CDN, I'm sure they can sell you some)
Tl;dr: you're not wrong, but the desert has water in it, if you know where to look.
Most users have no use for a static adress space. Those are usually business or power-user needs.
This you are classified as that. A power-user.
The reason they have no use for a static address is because applications haven't evolved to work that way. Roll back the clock 30 years, do IPv6 seriously so that everyone has static assignments by the time the Y2k problem has come and gone, and you have a very different Internet.
In fact, many applications, like VoIP and game hosting, have to go through all sorts of hoops to work around NAT.
There's pretty much no use for a normal person, just for business and power users like the person above you.
For your couple examples, nobody at home actually runs VOIP except a couple nerds just like nobody has home phones except a couple of old people. And quick game servers don't need statics, and if you are hosting something long term that would push you into the power use space.
It would be handy for piracy to always know your friend's IP addresses. Like friend-to-friend networks like Retroshare
And having a friend-to-friend piracy network absolutely pushes you into "power user" territory lmfao
. . . nobody at home actually runs VOIP . . .
Plenty of people used Skype and Vonage. Both were subverted because they have to assume NAT is there.
. . . quick game servers don’t need static . . .
But they do work better without NAT. That's somewhat separate from static addresses.
My old roommate and I had tons of problems back in the day when we tried to host an Internet game of C&C: Generals behind the same NAT. I couldn't connect to him. He couldn't connect to me. We could connect to each other but nobody outside could. It's a real problem that's only been "solved" because a lot of games have moved to publisher-hosted servers. Which has its own issues with longevity.
Fyi, Skype was officially killed by Microsoft on May 5th, earlier this month.
Use hostnames and dynamic prefixes or addresses don't really matter. Haven't had an issue in years and my last isp changed prefixes multiple times a week. I mean technically it would not be available for five minutes when IP changes but never noticed.
It's just one more bullshit thing to set up, but yeah I might be doing it soon.
If you’re looking for sympathy, you got it. Fuck the state.
If you’re looking for solutions, use a cheap $5/mo VPS that exists purely as your gateway host. Run everything you want on your home machines, then tunnel the traffic to your gateway and reverse-proxy it there. Your data stays in your hands, you can spin up and expose new services publicly in a matter of minutes, AND your home IP isn’t vulnerable to doxxing or DoS.
use a cheap $5/mo VPS that exists purely as your gateway host
Now, why so expensive?
https://racknerdtracker.com/?sort=price
Disclaimer: I never used Racknerd (nor any other VPS).
"JUST $10.28/YEAR - WOW!!" Laughed out loud at that, and I'll have to give this a look. Currently I just use nginx and duckdns to expose my home IP for my self hosted stuff.
I've used them for years with literally zero issues. Performance a for a cheap VPS. And since all the real work happens on my machines, if they enshittify, I can easily move elsewhere.
Thanks king, this actually makes sense!
I think you need to take the tin foil hat off mate.
IPv4 in many places has RAN OUT. No more, zilch.
Most people can get a fully functioning CGNAT address and surf the IPv4 web just fine.
Most VPS providers will give you IPv4 and IPv6 just fine.
So really the only issue is for the 10-20% of people who need to host an online service, security camera or online game system that doesn't have a server or rendezvous service.
You can get IPv6 addresses. What you can't get, in many cases, is a static IPv6 prefix assignment.
CGNAT is not fine. Its problems are simply hidden from most people. ISPs have to have more equipment that's less reliable, increases latency, and is potentially a bandwidth bottleneck.
My ISP is a local deal, well-known for protecting privacy, and run by an absolute nerd (in the best way possible, also outspoken about privacy, FOSS, and other such things). Their customer service is second-to-none; I had an issue with my static IP a couple years back, and had an actual engineer on the line within a few hours. On a weekend.
It's XMission. I dropped Comcast for them once they were in my area. Comcast can climb up a cactus.
I’m jealous. Xmission is all around me but not in my area. Luckily I have another local ISP (and not Comcast) but they want $10 a month for a static IP.
I pay $89/mo total for symmetrical gigabit via UTOPIA, no monthly cap, and my static IP. I was paying Comcast a hair over $60/mo before this for 400/20 via cable w/1.2TB cap.
Absolutely worth it.
<<<< has ipv4 static ip to my house. I do pay a small premium though. Like $15 bucks.
$5 for mine
Vodafone gave me an IPv4 in Germany no problem. I asked and they gave it to me. They said it's not static, but it hasn't changed for me in years.
Xfinity in the states is like that too. Technically I don't have a static but it's only changed twice in 4 years or so.
Once was during a really really bad storm which took power down in my state for days so I don't blame them, and the other one was when they did work on my local node but they sent out an email and a letter before hand lol
I think you're giving their ability to coordinate too much credit. Best guess the ISPs are just withholding anything that requires investment to deploy or that they can monetize themselves. Everybody else is just bottom-feeding by selling workarounds wherever the ISPs can't or won't.
The invisible hand of the market sucks at creating optimal solutions, but it does great at creating scammy crap that will take your money, no conspiracy necessary.
The big issue is that your network provider is also the physical provider, and there's no real competition as a result.
When most people got their Internet service over telephone lines, your ISP didn't need to also own the telephone lines, they just needed some telephone numbers.
When the telcos themselves got into the business of providing internet access, they pushed out the competition.
The 1996 Telecommunications Act, written by a Republican Congress, and signed into law by a Democratic president (Clinton) is largely responsible for the current state of affairs.
The "Information Superhighway" is a toll road, built by taxes, but owned by private corporations.
What's crazy is that the government paid these corporations to build this infrastructure.
When your government pays, say, a road building company to build roads, one doesn't then grant the ownership of those roads to that company.
But that is EXACTLY what we did with our communications infrastructure.
Huh????
Honestly I don't see your problem, a nuance? Sure! An unsolvable problem? For sure not.
If you want to have your system reachable from the Wan then you will need a domain name. If you have a domain name then it is needed to be resolved by a dns server.
If there is a dns resolver then you would able to update it dynamically every time your ip changes.
True that the time alive of the dns records must be low enough to ensure that an ip change does not let your system down for an unacceptable amount of time.
That is basically what they do yes. ISPs are the only thing standing in between the entirety of humanity and out of the box selfhosting. With fixed IPv6 IP addresses you could build and sell devices that just self host all your stuff out of the box. You could just sell complete normie people a "cloud box" that they can slap in their home for a one time cost that will take care of all their cloud storage and smart device needs. You could integrate it into any smartphone OS ootb so that all you have to do is scan a QR code on the "cloud box" and it connects all your apps that need it to it.
If you only care about having a static IPv6 address take a look at TunnelBroker by Hurricane Electric. They give you free /48 IPv6 blocks tunnelled through their network. Words of warning though: 1) some ISPs block using this service (prevent the tunnel from working), 2) in my experience I’ve seen high latency due to weird routing, 3) those IPs ending up on blocklists due to abuse and 4) the tunnel is unencrypted so traffic between you and Hurricane Electric is trivially intercepted, though if that was a problem in the first place then you wouldn’t be hosting from your home network anyway so this is mostly moot.
This is a huge problem. We need to start our own ISPS. Municipal owned or alongside a microgrid co-op are good options