alt Hacker NewsBeen having a nice break over the new year, thank you :)
I can't argue with sticking on IPv4 when you have no need for IPv6. However, people saying no NAT means no firewall really bothers me because it's just wrong and usually gets thrown around as part of a point around "who needs IPv6 anyway".
The two layers IMO don't make a practical difference. A deny by default firewall will fail closed, unless poorly configured. A poorly configured firewall for IPv4 with NAT can still leave machines exposed. This is not an IPv4/IPv6 problem this is down to your router. However you do expose what used to be private addresses with IPv6, but there's not much to do with the address that couldn't be done with your IPv4 address assuming sane firewalls that both stacks run.
On the other side of the coin IPv6 being ubiquitous would make my life much easier. I self host a few things across a few different machines. IPv6 offers me a much simpler solution, both to managing firewalls and not needing to fight over port 80/443, but also because I can't get a public IPv4 address from my ISP without spending ungodly amounts of money. They support IPv6 but many of the services I host don't support it. I have to use a second site + machine, wireguard tunnels, and nginx socket proxies to expose stuff publicly (this is cheaper than the public IPv4 address from my ISP).
My point about DHCPv6 is to say that if you want to use DHCP in IPv6 you can. It's right there, it's just not the default.
IPv6 doesn't make things substantially harder, just different. But people don't want to learn new things because, to be fair, they don't need them. But people who do need IPv6 are stuck behind garbage ISPs and this "not my problem" attitude throwing around ignorant arguments. Complaints about long addresses really get me too :), use a DNS.
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If you disable the firewall with a “master disable” I suspect IPv6 routes through on at least some routers. Meanwhile if the NAT is disabled, it almost surely takes the route with it, and even if it somehow routes thorugh you probably won’t get a DHCP lease from your ISP for more than a device or two.
> you do expose what used to be private addresses with IPv6
its been 10 years since i first rolled my eyes at ipv6 due to this problem. youre saying its still a problem, over a decade later? ugh. bring on ipv7 or ipv8.
>IPv6 doesn't make things substantially harder, just different. But people don't want to learn new things
I learn new things all the time. IPv6 is much more complicated, and importantly, more complicated than it needs to be. There is really no reason for most devices to be publicly reachable. Everyone keeps holding this up as a positive, but it's absolutely not. Most devices aren't servers. Yes, a firewall can prevent these connections, but the whole standard is built around this use case most people don't need most of the time.
Private IP space is incredibly useful. I build it and set it up -- my ISP does not have control. This is _gone_ with IPv6 and it makes things much more complicated than they need to.