alt Hacker NewsOn one of my linux machines the "localhost:8080" did not work after new installation. It resolves to local ipv6 address, while server only listened on ipv4.
After this I go out of my way to disable, remove and nuke ipv6, out of every setup and deployment I do. Ipv6 is already quite complicated, but supporting TWO competing network stacks, with complicated pseudo compatibility, just multiplies unnecessary complexity!
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What you seem to be misunderstanding is that your whole process of nuking IPv6 is more work than studying the issue for a few minutes and then listening on both protocols. Setting a service to listen on a port will use both IPv4 and IPv6 by default, and if yours isn’t means you’re probably already doing something wrong or also have other bugs.
Or, you could've fixed your server's configuration. Probably would've been faster than to "disable, remove and nuke ipv6". In general, the mistake is that it says "0.0.0.0" or "0.0.0.0:8080" somewhere where it should really say "::" or "[::]:8080".
(IPv6 sockets by default accept IPv4 connections, unless you disable that either system-wide or on the specific socket.)
By the way, I do agree the colon was a really poor choice for separating the blocks, when it is also used to separate the port number.