Subj : Re: New rule
To   : Michiel van der Vlist
From : Nick Boel
Date : Sat Jul 26 2025 09:38 am

Hey Michiel!

On Sat, Jul 26 2025 02:06:38 -0500, you wrote:

 > Yes that seems to be the case. But once they are accepted, they are 
 > seldom checked again. If checked, only for a responding server, not 
 > for responding to netmail. So we have many ghost systems in the 
 > nodelist...

At this point, most *Cs should probably be trying to welcome new applicants with open arms, and even try to help them get setup. Long gone are the days of sifting through applications, giving some kind of robot response and once they're able to send/receive netmail, /allowing/ them to join. Now, while unfortunate, we are more at a point of desparation and hanging on to dying technology till the bitter end.

 >> I agree. While there may be more nodelisted sysops than IPv6 
 >> systems, There's definitely less than 100 people that regularly 
 >> participate in the English speaking side of Fidonet these days.

 > Don't forget that these days many if not most messages in Fidonet are 
 > written in the Cyrillic alphabet...

That was implied in the paragraph you replied to, which is why I mentioned the "English speaking side of Fidonet". I was only basing what I had said off what I see personally.

 > Still... As I mentioned before, when promoting IPv6 in Fidonet I 
 > sometimes run into a brick wall. The first brick wall is that of 
 > denial. No, denial is not a river in Egypt. (Roy Witt) IPv6 is a 
 > hype, there is noo need for it, IPv4 is functioning well and will 
 > remain to do so, if not for the rest of the century, then at least 
 > for the coming decades.

And you always will run into those walls. This is somewhat comparable to sysops that still wish to run BBS software from the 80s/90s, that don't and will never support things like a TZUTC kludge. It's ultimately their choice. 

 > For those confronted with te reality of IPv4 exhaustion and the 
 > shattered brick wall of denial, there is brick wall #2. Hang on to 
 > IPv4 no matter what tricks it needs.

Some people don't like change, until they're ultimately forced to do so. If IPv4 is ever fully phased out, my guess is Fidonet will lose another big chunk of nodelisted sysops. Much like when darktech.org and no-ip.com were abandoned, but on a bigger scale.

 > IPv4 exhaustion may not be a serious problem for the incumbents in 
 > parts of the world where IPv4 was historically issued as if it would 
 > last forever.

I imagine some of these bigger ISPs, mine included (Spectrum), bought up a ton of IPv4 blocks because they saw all of this coming and could afford to take it all away from smaller ISPs for themselves. Heck, there may even be enough IPv4 addresses at these large ISPs to go around still, but they are hoarding them for their own (current and future) customers.

While I don't follow the situation very much, nor do I have any experience with it (I have native "dynamic that never changes unless I change hardware" IPv4 that I have always had, as well as native "dynamic that never changes unless I change hardware" IPv6), but do you think these bigger ISPs rent out some IPv4 addresses to smaller ISPs just so they can do said DSLite kind of setups?

Is this DSLite setup a bunch of private addresses not open to the outside, that run off of one or a few public addresses so they basically disable any incoming traffic so they can make more use of a single IPv4 address?

Regards,
Nick

.... Sarcasm: because beating people up is illegal.
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