exactly. I have been begging multiple ISPs for direct IPv6 allocations for 10+ years now. its always “we are internally testing - not available for distribution yet”. the most recent request from me was less than 3 months ago when I needed a IPv4 /29 for a remote site. figured I would see if I could also get a nice sized IPv6 allocation as well. nope. just gotta keep paying a premium for that dwindling IPv4 address space.

Hurricane Electric is to be commended for their public IPv6 tunnels, but without direct allocations from your immediate upstream, its just play.

10.0.0.0/8

172.16.0.0/12

192.168.0.0/16

🎶 a whole new wooorrrld… 🎶

there is no fix more permanent than a temporary one.

edit: as I literally sit here inspecting the nat tables on a couple of edge routers.

thanks for the excellent reply. will check out all of your links.

I do like built-in light weight threading, so Go is still on the to-play-with list and I am currently tracking a few Go projects to get my feet wet.

you have given me options and impetus to get out of my decades long rut and, honestly, that is the best gift any programmer can give to another. thank you, friend.

thanks for the reply. C++ never really clicked for me. I started out decades ago with C and enjoyed living on the edge with older hardware and OSes - when neither the OS nor the hardware will defend itself from an application, things get real fun, real fast.

as PC hardware matured, python filled in the safety spaces when needed and I eventually just used python with C bindings to balance speed and safety as needed for any particular project.

I have never seriously looked at ada, but your comment piqued my interest, so I may just play with it for a bit. Go… what can I say about Go… like C++ its just feels “odd” to me. cant really explain why, perhaps it just feels too… “google”?

I am going to be taking some time to really try groking Rust over the next 6 months… from what I have seen so far, Rust is the language that I wanted C++ to be so many years ago… fills in many more gaps and gives an expansive playground for various types of projects - many of the benefits of python-like and C-like languages in a nice, unified space.

would love to get your thoughts on that if you have time.

heh! so glad I intentionally avoided C++ from the get-go. C when I want to blow some fingers off quickly, python when I want to stroll down a country lane picking flowers. there is no in-between ;-)

heh, forgot about the standalone web server in certbot. thats a good ephemeral option.

if you are able to run a public web server, then certificate issuance via certbot http challenge works pretty well. the web server can serve a really simple static page with little to nothing on it - but of course its another potential vector into your network.

if your public domain DNS makes use of a supported dns provider or you run your own publically accessible dns server, then dns certbot challenges are great and more flexible than http.

others may suggest neat work arounds for the http challenge issue, but if you have access to a supported dns service I would look at that option. certbot has helpers for quite a few public services as well as support for self hosted dns servers. I run my own public dns servers, so thats the option I chose and use certbot hooks, cron and bash scripts to rsync the updated carts to the propr hosts for the various services I run privately and publicly.

if you are using http cert retrieval, certbot needs a place put the temp. token to authenticate your contrrol of the domain your are creating a certificate for. usually that will be the same webserver you want to serve the certificate from.

if you are not running an actual weberver on port 80 that certbot can insert a token for, certbot cannot complete.

this is, of course, in addition to other possible issues such as ISP port blocking - but without a web server listening on TCP/80, you will have to use other authorization methods (like DNS) to generate a cert.

are you actually running a web server on that host? iirc, certbot will place a temporary token to be served by your web server (Apache, etc.) to show that you actually control the domain you are requesting a cert for.

I switched to DNS based retrieval as soon as let’s encrypt offered it, so its been years since I retrieved certs via http.

a great share. thanks.

love this. fantastic work, my friend.