I would just a soon solve this by having a server to serve files to all my retro machines and leave them off the internet entirely...However I use a Synology Diskstation and I can't manage to get my Win 98 or earlier machines to connect to it which sucks. I'm sure there is a solution for me I just haven't found it yet.

Never heard of abandoning the IP4 internet base until this thread.
Do there exist actual plans of doing that in the near future (say, 20 years)?

No need for a proxy as far as protocols are concerned that's what your router is for if your client doesn't support ipv6 but for browsing the internet then we are already at the point where web render proxy is needed for <Windows 95 clients. For <2000 then TLS 1.2 proxy or browsers that support TLS 1.2 need to be used but since these browsers aren't being updated then browsing is slowly breaking so web render proxy is needed.

FreeNAS still supports Windows 95 clients. If Synology doesn't then they likely don't provide the option in the GUI to allow changing the minimum protocol or removed support. If you can modify the samba conf file directly then you may be able to get it to work by adding the proper settings. The NAS should also support FTP.

I'd like to give this a try, do you have a link to a guide for what I would need to edit the samba config for Windows 98 and older to be able to access it?

These seem to be the options available to me in the GUI:

I also have NFS settings, would that help with Win 98 access? This is a bit of a blindspot in my knowledge so I appreciate anyone taking their time to help me.

I haven't tested my Synology NAS yet but I've verified accessing shares again from Windows 95 to my FreeNAS server today. Without setting smbpasswd you'll be stuck to granting guest access to any shares so make sure you use smbpasswd if you don't want to grant guest.

The following is what is needed on FreeNAS to allow it to work.

SYSTEM->TUNABLES (MIGHT NOT BE NECESSARY)
Variable: freenas.services.smb.config.server_min_protocol
Value: NT1
Type: sysctl
Comment: SMB1

SERVICES->SMB
Auxilary Parameters->
min protocol = NT1
lanman auth = Yes
client lanman auth = Yes
client plaintext auth = Yes

The above options will allow access to Freenas from 9x clients. The below smbpasswd command will allow access to shares requiring authentication. If the below smbpasswd does not work then your only option is to setup another share and allow guest access (don't enable on your regular shares) Change permissions for "Everyone" to write access on the guest share.

From FreeNAS command prompt:

smbpasswd -a username

Use the same username on guest as on the FreeNAS host

None of the above may be required if NTLMv2 is used on 95/98 with dsclient but I couldn't get it to work with FreeNAS so Lanman it is.

/EDIT
It appears that enabling NTLMV2 on 95/98 appears to work without the above settings in Services->SMB but may be inconsistent, needs more testing. Verified working by deleting the reg key, rebooting and receiving IPC error and then adding it back rebooting and logging on. Think main issue is when having one 9x machine using lanman and the other using NTLM which causes both to not work. Have all machines use one or the other not both.......

retardware wrote:

Never heard of abandoning the IP4 internet base until this thread.
Do there exist actual plans of doing that in the near future (say, 20 years)?

As far as I know there's not a defined timetable but yes, at some point in the future IPv4 will be entirely substituted by IPv6.

And IT admins everywhere will cry.

How the %$#^%$%&%^**%^ are we supposed to remember static IP addresses of different devices once we go IPV6?

The same way we do today: Documentation, Labels, DHCP, DNS

I memorize my static IPs.

We will all be dead and gone long before IPv6 reaches critical mass. 😉 It reminds me of a joke I once heard: "IPv6 walks into a bar. Nobody notices it."

Seriously though, with NAT, you don't technically need to run IPv6 on an internal network, and by the time we've outgrown IPv4 entirely, there won't be anywhere on the web you can still access with a PC that doesn't (or can't) have an IPv6 stack anyway. Google circa 2025 won't be viewable on Netscape Navigator 4.0 anyway, so who cares?

IPv6 tried to be the everything-to-everybody protocol that fixed ALL the things "wrong" with IPv4, and with enough room to grow that we're already doing ridiculous things like handing out millions of IPs to anyone with a pulse -- and even that's negotiable. It was definitely a "designed by committee" thing, initially eschewing things like NAT because "hey, who needs translation when you can just have your own public IP??" Quite honestly, I would not be surprised if the entirety of the communications industry drags its feet until someone comes along with a far more elegant alternative. We're already running dual stacks. Who knows. Maybe OSI will take another crack at it.🤣

I, for one, don't look forward to memorizing 64-bit static IPs either. Forget hex. Let's use the entire alphabet and shorten that puppy to something that sounds less like bragging rights to how many decimal places you can recite Pi. Signed, 3:14159265354/48.

You can always use a network bridge between your IPv4 client and the IPv6 network.

appiah4 wrote:

You can always use a network bridge between your IPv4 client and the IPv6 network.

This. There are translation mechanisms that allow IPv4 clients to remain viable.

SirNickity wrote:

We're already running dual stacks.

Oh that reminds me of something. Not quite on-topic, but worth mentioning:
Under certain situations, in a LAN, were only one of both of the protocols is configured properly,
a so-called "shadow netwok" can erroneously appear. See Wikipedia for more information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Shadow_networks

IPv4 won't be going away anytime soon. IPv6 adoption is not progressing too quickly, and many, many legacy systems still depend on IPv4.

gdjacobs wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

You can always use a network bridge between your IPv4 client and the IPv6 network.

This. There are translation mechanisms that allow IPv4 clients to remain viable.

But what happens when all ISPs are using IPv6 and all public internet is IPv6-only, and you and your friends want to play an old online game over internet but the game doesn't understand IPv6? I guess some sort of a VPN solution would become necessary.

Static NAT can fix that. Take some given IPv6 address (or subnet) and translate it at the router to some unused IPv4 address or subnet. As long as the router can substitute outgoing IPv4 to that bogus subnet to the real IPv6 network, the hosts don't know or care. Exception might be when the protocol embeds addresses within the data stream, because the router would have to know the protocol and swap the embedded addresses as well. But this sort of thing breaks existing IPv4 NAT (which everyone uses, and has since at least the early 2000s), so it's either already a problem, or there is already an application layer gateway (fixup) that does the embedded address swap.