Radicle: peer-to-peer collaboration with Git

Posted Apr 11, 2024 13:15 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
Parent article: Radicle: peer-to-peer collaboration with Git

> Radicle does not yet have "NAT punching", but relies on third-party, publicly accessible seed nodes.

Maybe I missed it and could do a little more research but does the application work with IPv6 addresses because that can restore peer-to-peer connectivity in a lot of cases, Google was recently reporting that around 40% of their traffic is now IPv6 so even if _your_ ISP or your region doesn't support it yet, others support it very well, so plan A can be direct IPv6 p2p and plan B can be some NAT traversal technology.

Tangent: Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm wondering about the production history of Teredo protocol as used by the Xbox, I'm not sure Xbox Live still uses it but I haven't seen a retrospective on what the pros and cons of it were, operationally. Teredo (IIUC) is an IPv6 tunnel over IPv4/UDP designed to work behind a NAT and encode the public NAT IP and port for peer-to-peer NAT traversal, the Xbox used it for p2p gaming to reduce latency vs bouncing all traffic from behind NAT routers through a central server. Maybe games just moved away from p2p flows toward mediation through a central game arbiter as an anti-cheat measure, dunno.

Radicle: peer-to-peer collaboration with Git

Posted Apr 11, 2024 14:33 UTC (Thu) by atnot (subscriber, #124910) [Link]

Unfortunately not really. While it does significantly improve the situation around CGNAT, what we call "nat holepunching" is really two things: Creating a NAT ip-port mapping and an entry in the stateful firewall's connection list. With IPv6, you don't need to do the former, but in almost all cases you still have to do the latter.

Radicle: peer-to-peer collaboration with Git

Posted Apr 11, 2024 14:38 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

If you mean what I think you mean, maybe it's just not used now because there's no need?

Aiu you, an xbox would open an IPv4 link to a Microsoft server that was both IPv6 and IPv4. It would then get an IPv6 address from that server, and tunnel all IPv6 traffic over the IPv4 link.

If I was implementing something like that, I'd just ask for an IPv6 address from my local DHCP, and only use Teredo if I couldn't get one. In which case XBox Live could still be using that, just that as IPv6 has got more universal Teredo would disappear naturally of its own accord.

I'm not aware of using IPv6, but to the best of my knowledge my router is dual, and my PCs and laptops support IPv6 by default ... so hopefully by now NAT is just dying out naturally ...

Cheers,
Wol

Radicle: peer-to-peer collaboration with Git

Posted Apr 12, 2024 1:45 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

You can check the IPv6 stats for Google here: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html - it's very sad.

> Maybe I missed it and could do a little more research but does the application work with IPv6 addresses because that can restore peer-to-peer connectivity

It won't. IPv6 in practice behaves like NAT, you need both peers to somehow communicate their decision to their firewalls. You can't just randomly connect to a port of an IPv6 peer and expect it to work. This is especially true for mobile devices, which form the main IPv6 deployment pool right now.