I see that lemmy.ml is the only major instance currently reachable over IPv6. When will lemmy.world join the modern internet?

  • taco_ballerina@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Slightly off topic, but perhaps you can point me in the right direction. I recently upgraded my home router/NAT firewall to one that runs pfSense and it now supports IPv6. I was slightly horrified to find that DHCP had assigned all my devices IPv6 addresses and that they were all publicly routable. Comments online seemed to indicate that in order to protect devices on my local network from being probed by external entities I’d have to create custom firewall rules. I know just enough to know I didn’t want to do that as the likelihood of doing it wrong and compromising security far outweighed any benefit I’d see from IPv6. The only other option was to disable all IPv6 traffic at the firewall.

    What am I missing here? Is it intended that regular home users have their printer, which the manufacturer hasn’t seen fit to update since Bush Jr. was president, exposed to the entire Internet? Is it that the IPv6 space is so large that port scanning for vulnerable machines is like finding a needle in a haystack?

    • Redex@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      In general, you should probably turn on your router’s NAT even for IPv6. What you mentioned is a security concern, and while yes, the IPv6 address space is enormous and finding a valid address is hard, if somebody already knows your IPv6 address it’s a lot easier. For a home user there isn’t really a reason for your ports to be accessible from the outside, and if you need such a thing, you can easily port forward specific ports.

      edit: To add to that, turning on your router’s NAT isn’t a problem, you can always port forward, the problem with IPv4 is that you’re behind two NATs, your router’s and your ISP’s. Because of this, you can’t actually open up any port to be publicly visible on the Internet, which is extremely frustrating.

      edit edit: Reply to my comment pointed out that what I suggest is retarded.

      • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        In general, you should probably turn on your router’s NAT even for IPv6.

        No, you should not! NAT is not needed with IPv6 and you should never use it unless you really know what you are doing.

        NAT is not a security feature, firewalls are, the default firewall rules from consumer routers are generally enough (allow outgoing, deny incoming except if it’s an existing connection). And if you’re concerned about others tracking hosts inside your network, the default settings of Privacy Extensions makes your device assign itself different IPs for outgoing connections every so often.