I have a simple networking question:
My friend and I were trying to play Minecraft on Windows (7), where he was the server and I was the client. In order to join his hosted server he gave me his ipv6 address. I couldn't connect to his Minecraft server, so I connected to his machine via remote desktop and I double checked his ipv6 address like this:
ipconfig
You will see a list of IP addresses for the network interface, among which ipv4 and ipv6.
In this case, three ipv6 addresses were displayed. I chose the second ipv6 line and I copied that.
I pasted this ipv6 address in as the server address to connect to and it worked, I could connect.
Then I asked him: "Where did you get that non-working ipv6 address from?" and he said "I just looked it up on the internet" (I assume he used a "what is my IP address" website or a straight google query response).
My friend doesn't understand how this works. He complained and asked me: "Well, how come that ipv6 address you got worked and mine didn't? That's a local address, isn't it? Well, how can that possibly work? How can you as an outside user get to an internal address? I don't understand. How does that work?"
and I told him: "Well, it's simple. The router takes internal traffic and redirects it to the outside world" to which he said: "No, all a router does is it allows traffic in", to which I said: "yeah but it also routes traffic through route paths".
Anyway, the discussion got out of hand, so, since I don't know much about networking, I decided to ask here on the internet to clarify the situation.
So how come this works? How come I can connect to that ipv6 address from the outside? What's happening on the network layers in order for this to work? What's the router's role in this? Does this have to do with NAT?
Thank you.
My friend and I were trying to play Minecraft on Windows (7), where he was the server and I was the client. In order to join his hosted server he gave me his ipv6 address. I couldn't connect to his Minecraft server, so I connected to his machine via remote desktop and I double checked his ipv6 address like this:
ipconfig
You will see a list of IP addresses for the network interface, among which ipv4 and ipv6.
In this case, three ipv6 addresses were displayed. I chose the second ipv6 line and I copied that.
I pasted this ipv6 address in as the server address to connect to and it worked, I could connect.
Then I asked him: "Where did you get that non-working ipv6 address from?" and he said "I just looked it up on the internet" (I assume he used a "what is my IP address" website or a straight google query response).
My friend doesn't understand how this works. He complained and asked me: "Well, how come that ipv6 address you got worked and mine didn't? That's a local address, isn't it? Well, how can that possibly work? How can you as an outside user get to an internal address? I don't understand. How does that work?"
and I told him: "Well, it's simple. The router takes internal traffic and redirects it to the outside world" to which he said: "No, all a router does is it allows traffic in", to which I said: "yeah but it also routes traffic through route paths".
Anyway, the discussion got out of hand, so, since I don't know much about networking, I decided to ask here on the internet to clarify the situation.
So how come this works? How come I can connect to that ipv6 address from the outside? What's happening on the network layers in order for this to work? What's the router's role in this? Does this have to do with NAT?
Thank you.
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