logoalt Hacker News

Panzerschrektoday at 6:04 AM1 replyview on HN

"white IP address" is an address that your internet provider gives you and which is accessible from the whole internet, not just some address local for the provider's network and hidden behind NAT. Since IPv4 addresses are scarce, most providers don't allocate them directly to their customers.

An unique IPv6 may be theoretically assigned to each end device and thus solve the accessibility problem for locally-hosted servers, but I doubt internet providers do this in practice and I am afraid that many providers don't support IPv6 at all.


Replies

globular-toasttoday at 9:20 AM

That's usually called a public IP address, aka a real IP address.

IPv6 works exactly how you describe, that's the whole point of it. No NAT, just IP addresses. Some gaming consoles use it for peer to peer multiplayer so it is in demand even by normies. One of the problems is competition is stifled in the ISP market, by monopolies and ridiculously long contracts.