What is this?
No Nat November is a challenge to not use NAT(network address translation) in all of November. You can see a post other's attempt here: https://blog.infected.systems/posts/2024-12-01-no-nat-november/. The expensive way to do this is to grab myself a large IP block for home, and have all my devices use that. Sadly I am not made of money, so instead we'll be doing it the way everyone else does it and use IPv6.
IPv6 is the more recent version of the internet protocol which according to google, over half the world supports. But not all application developers, network engineers are willing to learn about the scary ip addresses with letters in them and support it in their application.
I'm doing this because in the real world, I've encountered multiple scenarios where I've been on IPv6 only networks, and none of the time has it been purposeful. I've seen misconfiguration be the main issue, with the DHCP server just not working(probably crashed or something), too small of a DHCP pool configured(seen this at airport lounges multiple times, with just a /24 configured on the DHCP pool, only 255 devices can get IPs, and that's very easy to surpass in an environment like a lounge). Usually people just think that the problem is the Wifi is broken and only works on sites that have IPv6 support, and to an extent, it is. But to a bigger extent, if more applications supported IPv6 and more sites did, then the user wouldn't have even known.
The goal for me is to figure out what applications that I use aren't supporting IPv6 well, and reach out to the developers to let them know and fix it. Usually its a very simple fix of adding an AAAA record to DNS since the webserver is already listening to IPv6 connections. But some legacy applications can throw errors when seeing IPv6 traffic and they might need to do more work.
Now, I do have a job and I do work from home, so I'm only activating this on my laptop when I'm not working. While I'll give IPv6 only a shot for work related things, unlike other things where I'll just give up the program that doesn't support it for the month, for work related, I'll make an exception.
The Setup
Since I'm trying to simulate broken IPv4, I planned my setup around this, by using a VPN configuration with a IPv4 setup that's designed to fail since it doesn't have access to the address I assigned it. The address should be .62 but I just changed it to .63 and it simulates what I need perfectly.
And then we are ready to go ahead and test things. One of the first things that I'd noticed is that I couldn't upload an image via PeakD and had to go to Hive.Blog for it. I do wonder if this is going to draw me away from PeakD and more towards Hive.Blog for the future since I'll be on the site more.
I'll provide updates as the month progresses, and see what works well, what doesn't and what's iffy.
What Can I Do
If you want to help progress tech, you too can try to use no nat this month! You can also install extensions on your browser to quickly see if the sites you are using are supporting IPv6: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipvfoo/ (chrome has it too), but this requires your home ISP supporting IPv6. If your home ISP doesn't, you can reach out and ask them to. With more calls for support, they are more likely to make the change.